The Best Armor
by aperfectsong
Summary: "Robin has always been one of those people who are strong because they pretend to be strong."  B/R  Read the companion piece to Part 1 - "The Lights of Hope" by idioticonion.
1. Part 1

_prompt: what was robin thinking when she sundress-ed up?_

Robin Scherbatsky stands in front of her closet door and doesn't let herself cry. Crying would be acknowledging pain, giving into it, showing weakness. And Robin has always been one of those people who are strong because they pretend to be strong.

It is an art she has perfected since childhood, something so ingrained in who she is that she barely notices it anymore - the image she puts forth and the one she hides.

Robin's first big hockey injury happened when she eleven years old during a pre-season pickup game. It wasn't one of those moments life slowed down for, but a unsuspecting check from behind that sent her crashing into a teammate and then down to the ice. Her helmet rolled off somewhere behind her as the spectators collectively inhaled. It happened so fast that she doesn't remember her own tears hitting the ice and making little melted dimples, the sound of her own scream as they reverberated around the rink, the scrape of her cheek against the rough ice, her father yelling "Don't move her!" as her teammate Pierre extracted his left foot from underneath her anyway.

All she remembers now, while she fingers through the dresses in her closet, is the throbbing in her stomach and the idea of blood, maybe, pooling under her. How it felt to think you were dying.

"RJ, where does it hurt? Your head? Did you hit your head?" Her father's voice was frantic and only made her cry harder.

"My stomach," Robin gasped.

Her father turned her over carefully, the first and last time he ever treated her that way, she thinks now. She wonders if he, like she did, expected blood smeared all over her uniform, her guts torn out and spilling onto the ice, and was surprised to find nothing, not even a tear in her uniform. He pushed the hair out of her face, revealing a purpling bruise on her cheek from where she hit the ice.

"You're okay," he said, helping her to her feet, which were still shaking under her.

"But it hurts," she said.

"It's the shock of it, RJ," he told her. "Go sit on the bench for the rest of the period."

Robin played again in the third period, stinging tears in her eyes the entire time. When one of her teammate, a chubby boy named Gerald noticed, he said "that's why girls shouldn't play hockey," and Robin waited until after the game, when everyone had changed out of their uniforms and were waiting for a seat at the pizzaria down the street before kicking him as hard as she could between the legs and saying, "that's why boys shouldn't mess with me."

Her parents wouldn't discover the bruising on her abdomen until later that night and the broken rib until a day or two after.

For all that she hates her father, Robin knows she owes him something for everything he's made her learn about biting back pain. Because of her father, she once played a whole game with a broken nose; because of her father, she barely felt it, barely felt anything.

But there is something in this relationship with Don, this breakup, that has left her open and raw, and incapable, or unwilling maybe, to hide it; something that shows her how much of a fake she's been her entire life, never letting herself admit defeat.

How she couldn't, just couldn't, face Don again, not even to pick up her things. She contemplated just leaving everything there and starting fresh, but eventually settled for calling in sick to work and raiding his apartment during the show. She watched the end of the broadcast from his bed, breathing in the scent of him and listening as he said goodbye to New York. When it was over, she wiped her eyes and left her key on the kitchen table.

How she honestly thought he would call her, choose her, even after he had already left. It had taken nearly the entire summer for her to stop wishing he would.

How she felt something liberating in lying on the couch all day, crying in the shower, eating junk food for every meal, making her body on the outside reflect how she felt on the inside.

How she knew Ted wouldn't sleep with her when she was like that; that part of her just wanted another rejection, wanted hundreds of them, wanted the numb feeling that came with them or maybe after them.

It's not just that Robin wakes up at night with her face wet because her bed is empty or because the station has yet to find a replacement anchor, but it's everything, she thinks. She isn't where she set out to be in life - she's not even close, sitting with her back to the wall and her knees pulled up to her chest, giving in and crying because now, it seems, nothing makes sense.

Don, in a way that neither Ted nor Barney nor even Lily could, understood her. He understood waking up in the middle of the night to report the fluff pieces that no real news show would air. That they couldn't honestly call themselves journalists. And somehow, it was okay then, a joke they had over the rest of the world.

And then it wasn't. Because Don left her. Left her and her joke of a job as if he never loved her in the first place. Not that any of them really had.

Ted couldn't love what was independent and wild in her: he wanted to protect her, hold her, keep her. His love was always at odds with her own defenses, her past, and who she wanted to be.

And Barney - that was the only part of her he could handle loving, maintenance-free and completely physical. He couldn't deal with her anger or her guilt or anything real.

Robin isn't sure then if she came up to prove to Barney that she's still "got it" or to prove it to herself.

She looks in the mirror: her hair a messy nest of tangles, her skin greasy and tear-stained, her under eyes a dark purple, that dirty sweater she's worn every day after work for about a week. She laughs. And she thinks maybe Barney was right for once: she hasn't got anything left. She could fall into bed and pull the covers over her face, or lie in the bathtub for so long Ted would come up and open the door to see if she's still alive. And it wouldn't make a difference to her. The same way scotch and cheetos and even putting on makeup and real clothes won't change anything. She'll still feel like nothing will ever be better, that she's failed somehow at being herself, that maybe her father taught her right.

Then she starts crying again. She thinks even Vacation Robin was better than this ghost staring back at her, this ghost of bottomless tears and mess. She's such a mess.

She tells herself aloud, "No." Robin knows she sounds, looks, and probably smells like a crazy person anyway, so she says it again, "No." Still, her eyes don't listen.

So she decides to take a shower, get dressed, put on make-up, pretend to be strong, become invincible.

She stands in front of her closet and chooses a white sundress, the best armor she has.


	2. Part 2

A/N: Thanks for the positive feedback! I was planning on having this just be a one-shot, but I couldn't leave it alone! Enjoy!

Somehow, on a Tuesday at exactly noon, Robin finds herself sitting on Ted's couch, her feet at rest on the coffee table, and her third (or is it forth?) glass of scotch empty in front of her. The TV is turned to a marathon of some American show that looks like a rip-off of a show she used to watch as a child in Canada. But Robin isn't really paying attention to the plot.

Although she knows better, Robin is thinking of the words she imagines her father would use to describe her life right now, something along the lines of a refusal to admit obvious failure, of turning the Sherbatsky name into a bad joke with the show and with that stupid commercial. At the same time, she is telling herself that whatever her father might think not only should be irrelevant, but also that neither her show nor the commercial even air in Canada. Even Robin Scherbatsky Sr. can't have an opinion on something he doesn't know exists.

Robin closes her eyes and rubs them with her thumbs. She's debating this with herself and getting slowly drunk on a Tuesday in November while all her friends are at work; she's wearing sweatpants and berating herself for letting these ideas from her father matter.

Then there's a knock at the door.

"What?" she calls, hoping for a solicitor or a Jehovah's Witness ignoring the meticulously placed sticker Ted brought home to ward them off. She wants to release this anger on someone. She is about to get up when the voice answers.

"Robin? Open the door." It's not a solicitor, but Barney, who is in his own right a sort of solicitor.

She turns the volume on the TV up, a little ashamed at sitting in her pajamas in the middle of the day getting closer to drunk with each sip of scotch.

"Oh just come in, Barney. I know you have a key," she says loudly.

"I. What? I do not have a key to your apartment." Barney sputters, muffled through the door, but a few seconds later, Robin hears the key turn in the lock. "Okay, so I do have a key. It's for _emergencies_. But just don't tell Ted."

"Don't have to. He knows," she answers noncommittally, pretending to be absorbed in the show but really remembering Ted's story of how he found Barney on a swivel chair two weeks before petting a white rabbit.

"Hey, The Wonder Years?" Barney says, sitting down on the couch next to her. "Finally decided to learn what it was like to grow up an average American kid!"

"Yeah, in the 1960s," she says, not mentioning that the 1960s came to Canada too, just not during the 1960s. "What are you doing here? Why aren't you at work?"

He shuffles his feet and acts distracted by whoever-the-boy-hero-is having a fantasy about his English teacher.

"Let's see," he starts. "I was... in the area, so I thought I'd see if you were up for a taco or something." He looks at her sweatpants and the scotch and then mock-sniffs the air. "Unless you've gone back to your cheetos-only diet."

Maybe it's just the mood she's in, but Robin doesn't laugh. She ignores the comment. "I'm not really dressed." She slouches further down into the couch, knowing that Barney has the attention span of a goldfish and will probably get bored in a few minutes and leave.

"Come on Sherbatsky," he whines. "Take a few minutes. Suit up, lunch-hour wingwoman style."

"For a taco?" she asks. "I'm not suiting up for a taco."

"Not just for any taco. For only the greatest taco this side of the Rio Grande, complete with guacamole and fri-hol-es and Mexican rice," he announces, simultaneously standing up for dramatic effect.

"Please tell me you aren't describing that hole in the wall place by GNB?"

"I am," he says in a tone that can only be described as majestic. "Because it is only the greatest—" He looks as if preparing to shoot flames out from under his sleeve, so Robin gives him a look.

"Barney," she warns. When she doesn't say anything else, he appears to concede something.

"Well, we could get steak. Would you suit up for a steak?"

"I don't want to get dressed. I just got undressed."

"OR, or, or, you know, you could come as you are and scare off all the other dudes for me."

Robin sits up and refills her glass of scotch. She doesn't answer. But as she's recapping the bottle, Barney grabs the drink and downs it in one gulp.

"Hey!" she says.

"You're already halfway to trashedsville, babydoll," he says, putting the empty glass down in front of her. "Okay, okay. So I saw the show today," he sighs. "Just come on."

She realizes then, why he is standing in her and Ted's apartment in the middle of the workday, trying to guilt her into suiting up, into fixing the dents and holes in her armor, trying to get her to forget or pretend that she didn't completely bitch out her co-star on live television after the baby-talking skank showed their mostly non-existent audience Robin's embarrassing commercial, that she didn't start crying like a child and run off the set immediately after.

And now, having Barney stand there in front of her, trying to fix it without really helping, without dealing with her father's thoughts floating around in her head, makes her impossibly angry at him. It occurs to her that _this _is the reason they couldn't work as a couple. Because Barney only knows how to avoid the issues that matter and Robin, Robin used to too, but for whatever reason (that failed leap she took for Don? the way her goal of becoming a real journalist has become nothing but a joke? the way everything she tells herself has begun to sound like defense mechanism left over from childhood?) has reached her breaking point.

"Just leave," she tells him.

"I'm not going to leave until you suit up and come with me."

"Well, I'm not going to." She makes a motion for the bottle of scotch, but Barney beats her to it.

"What are you, an alcoholic?" he says in a light-hearted kind of way, joking. He laughs a little and then stops abruptly, probably realizing that she very well could be; she realizes it too: drinking alone, drinking while upset, drinking to dull the memory of this morning. What Barney says next, he says quietly in that voice he barely uses, the one that sometimes escapes for a few seconds carrying the shadow of whatever it is Barney hides within him. "Look, can you just get up? Just stop doing this to yourself." In that fleeting, honest voice. But then it's gone. "Stop feeling shitty and just feel awesome instead," he says. "Always works. True story."

"Grragh, stop it!" She feels something in her rise to the surface. The empty glass is in her hand one second and smashed to pieces against the front door the next.

Barney flinches, eyes flickering between the door and Robin. "What the hell, Sherbatsky?"

She knows she cannot possibly look sexy in an angry way right now, the way he likes it. In fact, he looks a little shaken, as if she had been aiming for his head and only narrowly missed.

"Didn't mean to do that," she says.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure you didn't. You missed the target," he says and heads for the door in a huff. "Stinson out."

Even when they aren't dating, he won't fight with her; he has to escape until the problem goes away. Robin sighs and lets him go.

She locks the door behind him and crouches down to pick up the pieces of broken glass. She isn't careful because her hands are shaking and when one of the shards cuts into her palm, Robin lets herself cry for the second time that day.


	3. Part 3

By the time Ted gets home from GNB, Robin has cleaned herself up. She has put on a nice shirt and pair of jeans and those heels that make her legs look good but that kill the arcs of her feet; she is, by all appearances, normal, ready for a night out. The scotch's dull haze has faded off, leaving her world once again sharp along the edges. A little too sharp, she thinks, judging from the slight sober headache that aspirin hasn't been able to erase completely.

In the hours since Barney has left, Robin has decided that lying to herself is one thing and that lying to her friends is another. It's not that she thinks they'll judge her; it's more that certain things should be kept close, guarded even. And there is really no need to worry them, or worse, annoy them, with this funk she can't get herself out of. She has decided, again, in favor of armor, but in such a way that she also hates herself a little for it, for the necessary dishonesty that comes with it.

But, she figures, she knows how to best handle herself: the habits picked up from her father before she could decide against them: the scotch, the allowing her problems to weld together deep inside her and out of sight, the throwing of dishes against walls for the satisfying shatter of them coming to pieces, her problems then brushed away with a hand broom and taken out with the trash. It's just that now, these tactics aren't working as well as they used to. But Robin isn't a cynic, not at all; she knows things won't stay the way they are forever and the on-edge feeling she can't get rid of will eventually dissipate just as the haze from the scotch left her. This knowledge has already sunk in – she knows it, breathes it, but it doesn't make her feel any different. She wishes it were possible to skip forward to the next part of her life or maybe _feel_ this part less, watch it like a movie with a detached sort of involvement.

She greets Ted as he comes in and asks if she wants to grab dinner at McLaren's before he has to head out to his class. If he notices anything off in the forced effort she makes to smile and sound cheery as she agrees, he ignores it.

Because that's what Ted inherited from his parents. No, not the ignoring. But the not seeing – the taking words at face value and believing in fake smiles and every floating love-y feeling. Ted, she would say, is her foil, the anti-skeptic. Lately, she's starting to see them all this way: a bundle of nervous cords and skin born only to propel the personalities and defenses created and defined by their parents into another generation. Marshall is his father, or at least tries to be. Lily craves the control she lacked in childhood. And Barney, well, Barney never moved on from being the child abandoned and picked on, whose first impulse is to hide. She understands that these are the things they will spend their lives learning to live with, ignore, or overcome.

Together, Robin and Ted walk down the stairs to McLaren's and open the door to the dinner crowd. It's a group of New Yorkers different than those who come out at night for the bar scene: they are less made-up, less drunk, less desperate; they come in groups after work, ordering one or two drinks; they come for the conversation . Sometimes, Robin stays at the booth after Ted leaves for his class, and watches this group leave (none of them with strangers) and the other arrive (trying too hard, wanting only one thing). Even among them, she's not sure where she fits in, if she's coming or going or just staying put, outside of it all.

When they enter, Doug spots them and moves the "reserved" table tent aside. Ever since Ted accepted the job at GNB and hasn't been around to cook, they've been coming to the bar for dinner more often. They order burgers, as usual, and beer. But this time, Robin, with her headache, just asks for ice water.

"So, Robin," Ted says, after a few sips of his beer. "What happened with Barney this afternoon?"

Involuntarily, she almost spits her water in his face, but manages to hold it in and just choke on it a little. "What?" she asks, still sputtering. Her voice sounds off, higher and nervous. Barney wouldn't have gone back to work still angry, would he? He wouldn't have told Ted about their almost-fight, would he? Well, really, Robin's almost-fight with him. She is nervous now, feeling her resistance start to crumble. If Ted knows, she thinks she might start crying in the middle of McLaren's, in front of Carl and Doug and Wendy the Waitress; and they would never look at her the same again. And Ted, Ted would know that the strong-girl façade she puts up is really no stronger than cardboard, her guns and hockey and scotch just the cracked defense she hides behind. She is holding her breath, waiting for everything to burst out into the open.

"Tacos?" he prompts. "Didn't you to go out for tacos?"

Her heart rate slows to normal and she tries her best to answer calmly. "Oh," she says offhandedly. She doesn't meet Ted's eyes because she doesn't trust her eyes not to betray her. So instead, she looks at her glass as she moves it back and forth, swirling the ice cubes. She really is a terrible liar; she knows if she weren't in this mood, she'd give herself away. So she tells the truth. "I didn't go. I didn't really feel like tacos."

Ted sips his beer. In response, he says. "I know what you mean. I don't know what Barney sees in that taqueria. Every time I've agreed to go there, my body spends the rest of the day reenacting the Battle of Changping. And it ain't pretty."

A blank look from Robin prompts him to elaborate. "It's only the bloodiest battle in recorded history." Wendy the Waitress approaches their booth to refill Robin's water and bring their burgers while Ted explains the battle metaphor. He doesn't notice the looks on either of their faces. He continues, "Over 400,000 dead. More than Gettysburg and Waterloo. Well, technically, a lot of the Zhao soldiers were executed after battle instead of being casualties of the battle, but most historians still count their deaths as having occurred in battle."

"Gross," Wendy the Waitress says.

"I didn't mean that it's bloody! It was a metaphor... okay. I see your point. It was probably the wrong metaphor."

"What's the name of this taco place?" Wendy asks. "I want to make sure never to eat there."

"Jorge's Taqueria Mexicana," Ted and Robin say in unison.

After Wendy drops off their food, Ted begins shuffling through the papers in his messenger bag, making sure he has everything ready for the night's lecture. Even when his students are staging a mutiny, he still wants to impress them.

When they've almost finished their dinner, Ted brings out a sheet of paper and a pen from his bag and says, "Okay. New topic. Robin, I need you to help me brainstorm." He writes a title at the top: _Mission Restore Myself to their Good Graces _on top_. _He writes "1: Car Alarm" and strikes it out.

"I thought you gave up."

"I did give up," he says. "But then…" With that, Ted launches into an intricate story about how he won back one of his students (kind of?) with one of his dad-jokes. But to Robin, it seemed more like the boy momentarily forgot he was supposed to be angry at Ted instead of having forgiven him. It doesn't seem to Robin the positive driving force Ted sees it as, but she humors him.

They don't get far with their list at all before Barney comes in through the door and slides into the booth next to Ted.

"Ted Ted Ted," he says excitedly. "You missed it!"

He nods a hello to Robin, but immediately turns his attention back to Ted. She wonders if he's pretending nothing happened that afternoon or if he's just over it already.

"What?"

"Dude, after you left, Marks got called down to the ETR room and he totally knocked Bilsen out," he pauses the way a stage actor might, to build interest before continuing. "Only when the ambulance shows up, it's this hot chick who I guess is Marks' ex or something (she's like an even 10 on the hot-crazy scale) and she starts screaming at him. But you know that intern, the Asian one who wore the toga to the Halloween party? The one with the small boobs? She starts in on the medic and just like that, girl fight! So then Marks—"

At that moment, Robin gets up from her seat for a reason she can't fully understand but that she knows has something to do with Barney. She stands at the bar a few minutes, talking to Carl about the Canucks vs. Rangers game, interrupted every so often by someone asking for a drink.

She surprises herself by ordering a beer when Carl asks if she wants more water, but she doesn't think she can stay completely sober now that Barney's here, especially since Marshall and Lily aren't and the probability that she will be stuck having to talk to Barney is increasing with every passing minute. She knows that Ted has to leave soon in order to make it to class on time.

Robin takes her beer back to the booth and asks where Marshall and Lily are.

Barney doesn't look at her when she approaches, doesn't answer her question. But he's sitting across from her, eating the cold French fries she couldn't finish.

"Marshall said they won't be coming tonight," Ted says. "They didn't want us to know, but I think they're _trying_ again."

"Gahhrhh," Barney groans. "If it isn't terrible enough that they're going to be having a _kid_ and stop coming to the bar, they're abandoning us already. I think we're going to need a replacement annoyingly sick couple. But this time, they should be lesbians. And really hot."

Robin rolls her eyes.

"It's just tonight," Ted says. "They'll be here tomorrow. Marshall said."

"Just tonight, just tonight," Barney guffaws. "It is _not_ just tonight! It is every night for the rest of our lives!"

"And exactly how many times have you ditched us at the bar to go have sex?" Robin asks, meeting his eyes for the first time since that afternoon. He raises his eyebrows at her.

"Duh. Scoring with a 10 and having dull, married sex is not exactly the same thing, Robin." He eats a few more of her discarded fries before saying, "These are cold," and pushing them away.

"Well, I'm excited for them," says Ted. "Moving on to that next big stage in their lives, while the rest of us here are just doing the same-old same-old."

"Ted, just go get someone to artificially inseminate you already," Barney says. "Or pretend like Marshall and Lily's baby is your baby and tell it all your lame dad jokes. You could be the nanny while they're at work."

Ted sighs, half-ignoring Barney, and says, "I know neither of you are even looking for _the one_ so you can't really understand… But I'm not following my plan at all. And what if I already met her? Hell, what if I met her and screwed it up? What if it was supposed to be Victoria?"

It isn't meant to be a shot at Robin, but still, she feels it. But more than that, she wonders if it really could have been Victoria, if everyone one person is allotted a specific _the one_, if she and Ted together might have destructed something in the universe that night at her apartment. But she doesn't say any of this.

"I need a shot of something," Barney says and heads to the bar.

"It could have been, but, now it can't be," Ted finishes. He checks his watch. "Whoa. It's almost six thirty. I should get going."

"Ted," Robin says lamely, because she has to say something, "you haven't met her yet. If you did, you'd know."

"Thanks, Robin." Ted gets up and slings his bag over his shoulder just as Barney returns to the booth with a glass of scotch in each hand.

"Hey hey, where you going? I was mentally preparing myself for this conversation and what? You're gonna to be responsible and go teach your class?" He sets his drinks down on the table harshly and tries to look affronted, but it comes off, as it always does, as a joke.

Ted shrugs. "Sorry Barney. See you later."

"I just took a shot of tequila for that man," Barney announces to the entire bar before sitting down and looking Robin in the eye. She looks down at the table. Like a coward. "What the fuck is wrong with everybody?"

Robin takes a big gulp of beer and answers, "I don't know."

"You too," he says and Robin glares at him. "I know, I know. Not in public. You don't want to fight in public." He leans back in the seat across from her and sips his scotch. He looks around the bar, probably at the potential prospects for this evening. There are two girls in a booth nearby who are not nearly close to drunk enough for Barney and there's a red head flirting with Carl who looks about halfway there.

Robin can't say a word. Maybe because it's just stupid to pretend you're okay when the person you're pretending for knows you're lying. She doesn't know what she can say. So she leaves it up to Barney to either make conversation or run after the red head giggling at the bar.

She stares at the beer in front of her instead of his face. They sit in uncomfortable silence, listening to the waves of other conversations flicker around them. Somehow, Barney is already on his second glass of scotch.

"So what are we doing tonight?" he asks after a while. "Getting drunk while watching the Robin Sparkles show? Which I _will_ find, by the way, if you don't share it with me willingly. Or are we going to the shooting range to take our anger out on more inanimate objects?" He raises his eyebrows at her.

And she flinches, sort of. It's more like she tenses up. Then she brings the beer to her lips and finishes it. She doesn't know why all she can do is sit there and get upset instead of joking with Barney as she usually does. She just wants for something to fix whatever is wrong with her. She wants to not care that her life seems to be falling to pieces around her.

She sets the bottle back down at the table with a little too much force and he tells her, "Stop it." He almost whispers, "I'm not trying to piss you off. Just get a hold of yourself, Scherbatsky."

"Why don't you go pick up that red head already and leave me alone?" She doesn't mean to sound like such a bitch, but everything out of his mouth feels like a personal attack that she has no defense for.

"Dude. It's the Bro Code. Never leave a bro down." He says it like it's common knowledge, this strict honor system of his. "You still don't read my blog? God, I need some new friends who will just read my blog."

She knows he's trying to cheer her up. But it doesn't help. The fact that it doesn't makes her feel guilty. And from the look the flashes across her face for a minute, Barney looks like he knows something.

"Aren't you still mad at me?" she asks in a whisper.

"You know what, Robin? I actually don't know. But it seems like you want me to be." He takes a drink and swallows. "So why's that?"

"I don't know," she says because she doesn't know what to say. Childishly and nervously, she looks around to see if anyone could possibly be listening. She doesn't want to have this conversation. Especially not in an almost-crowded bar where Carl or Wendy the Waitress or Doug or maybe someone else she knows could overhear.

"Let's go upstairs," Barney suggests as he finishes his second glass. He doesn't wait for Robin to respond, just gets up and tells Carl to get him a bottle of scotch. Then he closes the tab.

Robin follows Barney out the door slowly. They haven't left together in a long time, not that them leaving together is them _leaving together_. But something about it makes her nostalgic in a distant kind of way for when they were together and would leave early, back before the ski trip. Before it got complicated and she became annoyed with their farcical methods of confrontation: avoidance, distraction.

When they cross the threshold into the apartment, Barney closes the door behind her. She goes, still slowly, to the couch and sits down. For some reason she feels a little like a ghost in her own apartment, watching Barney go into the kitchen for two glasses and bring them back, watching him fill them at the coffee table and sit down next to her.

"I know you're mad at me about something. So just get on with it. Yell at me for whatever it is."

Robin makes a frustrated noise and says, "I'm not mad at you. I'm just not like you."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know." She thinks she might, but doesn't say anything more. Instead, she picks up the glass Barney poured for her and takes a long drink. She doesn't look at him. She tells her drink, "I can't bounce back," but it comes out so softly, she's sure Barney hasn't heard her. Yet, she doesn't have the courage to repeat or clarify herself. She just feels so stupid. This is Barney, the least emotional person she knows. She knows she probably should have talked to Ted about this at McLaren's. He probably would have stayed home and sat with her and said all the right things. He would have commiserated. He isn't following his plan either.

"Okay," Barney says. "Fine." A pause. "So, Robin, how's work?" he says sarcastically. "I noticed that on your show today, you freaked out and started crying on live television in response to that stupid commercial. Why?"

"I don't want to talk about that."

"Wait wait wait. Let me get this right. You're mad at me and won't tell me why. You don't want to talk about what's wrong with you. And you don't want to do anything except sit on the couch and drink. Well, fuck then. Let's just get drunk already. Or were you looking for pity sex? Because if you were…" He loosens his tie halfheartedly.

"Barney," she says.

"What's your problem then? What do you want?" He makes a jerky movement and some of the scotch in his glass spills over the brim and sloshes onto the carpet.

"What's _your_ problem? How many shots of tequila did you take?"

"Just one," he answers, drinking half his glass of scotch in one sip, "or a couple. Tequila gets me. Everyone was all emo today, even Marshall at work all day whining about not getting Lily pregnant yet. And Ted about being alone and you crying after I left when I was still outside the door. I can't talk about this stuff without something. It's just weird."

Robin doesn't say anything.

"So what's your problem?" he repeats.

"I'm just overwhelmed and frustrated and I feel like shit, okay?" Robin says. She isn't yelling, but is somehow teetering along the line of crying and not crying. She tries to keep it out of her voice and hopes Barney doesn't notice. "I don't know what my problem is."

"Okay, then. So what did I do to piss you off?" his voice comes out quieter now.

Robin drains her glass. "Why talk to me now?" she asks. "I mean, when we were dating there were times when I wanted to talk to you-like when I had that bad day and you told me to talk to Lily about it. You just brushed me off then. What kind of boyfriend, no, scratch that. What kind of friend does that? It was like you didn't even care. So why do you suddenly want to talk now?"

"Robinnnnn," he whines. "I don't know. It's the tequila. Just talk. I did care. It's just hard to talk about _feelings_. Just tell me why you're mad at me."

"I'm mad because sometimes wearing sweat pants and not showering is how I feel," she starts, knowing it doesn't exactly make sense. She just feels so complicated; all of her feelings are complicated. "It's so hard to pretend to be fine all the time. I know you want me to act like nothing's wrong and go eat tacos and play laser tag and be your wing woman, but… it's selfish for you to say that. Maybe I'm selfish too. But sometimes, I think..." she speaks the next part quietly and in a jumbled rush, "that if you were really my friend and really cared, you wouldn't want me to… I know I'm not the best at dealing with things, but at least I try. At least I think about things instead of pretending they aren't there. I don't do this. Usually. I don't usually talk to people about things."

"Then why'd you get mad for me not wanting to before? It's weird, isn't it? Talking about things. It feels weird."

"I don't know. I'm just sick of it sometimes. I was thinking we're never honest. Not you and me but me and everyone. Not with each other or ourselves. Like this is armor," she gestures to her clothes. "I don't make sense. But it's armor, okay? The sundress, that was armor too. It's like… a shield. And when we're wearing armor, we don't get hurt, but we aren't being honest. We aren't being who we really are."

"So, you want to take off your clothes then?" he arches an eyebrow.

Robin sighs. "That's not what I meant. You aren't drunk already, are you?"

"Nooo," he laughs. "I was kidding. Kind of. It wasn't what I meant either. I meant the armor. Or whatever."

"Oh."

"So, is that it?" he asks. "You're upset about not being honest?"

"No. I mean. No. I just feel like shit. Nothing is going right and it hasn't for a long time. I mean, Don leaving like that, and Becky…well, existing, and I haven't gotten anywhere. I haven't made any progress. I just keep thinking about what my father would say." She's holding the empty glass in her hands, passing it from one to the other. "They had this party to send me off. And all of my friends, my family, they were so sure I'd become a real journalist. Be able to travel and discuss politics and international affairs. My father, he was the only one who was realistic, who told me it wouldn't be so easy. I just think, if they could see me now, still reporting about dog beauty pageants and interviewing people who make dolls and purses. All these years in New York and what do I have to show for it?"

"Um, you have us. You have me and Ted and Marshall and Lily." Then he sort of laughs, "_And_ you are in New York and not _Canada_. You've escaped that backwards land of mooses and those weird tennis racket shoes that people wear to walk on snow. Just take those people you talked about. They _stayed_ in _Canada_ for what? the six or seven years you've been here? What do they have to show for it?"

"The big things. Careers, relationships, that stuff." She puts her glass down on the table, withdrawing her hand slowly, as if it were somehow foreign to her. She takes in a shaky breath, all the while feeling like some angsty sixteen year old freaking out because she didn't get asked out to the prom or something. Like she's missing out on something big and important.

"Who needs that? Robin, you are awesome without careers and relationships."

"No, I'm not. I don't feel like I am. And I'm not asking you to boost my confidence with compliments or anything." She makes a noise. "It's just so frustrating to feel like this all the time. Why can't I feel better?" She leans over, elbows resting on her knees and puts her head in her hands. Then Barney scoots closer and drapes an arm over her shoulders. This makes her cry, not loud sobs or hysterical wailing, just tears that she wipes away with her fingers.

"Hey," Barney says quietly. "Come here." He turns and pulls her towards him so that her head is resting at the crevice of his neck.

It takes her a few moments to stop tensing up. If Robin Scherbatsky knows anything about herself it is that she doesn't do this. But Barney holds her in place even after she stops crying, so when she speaks, it is to the warm skin of his neck and the expensive fabric of his suit coat, and it does work, as comfort.

"It's just..." she starts. "Am I really going to talk to you about this?" she says this more to herself than Barney, "Barney Stinson." She pulls away and sits up, but doesn't look at him. Instead, she wipes the mascara from under her eyes and then pours herself another glass of scotch. The dry taste of it feels good going down her throat. "I was just so sure I was doing the right thing, choosing Don instead of Chicago. It's just shitty the way it worked out. In the end, I didn't even tell him I turned down the job. I didn't tell him about the job in the first place. Did you know that? I guess if I had, he probably wouldn't have taken it. Maybe he would have told me to. I don't know. We weren't even together that long, and I know you didn't like him. But it's just shitty getting left like that, after going out on a limb for someone. God, I feel like Ted. I mean, he probably felt worse after Stella. And here I am… What's wrong with me? This is stupid. Why can't I just get over it already?"

"It's not stupid," Barney says. He touches her hair, kind of petting her. He is probably drunk or close to it. She isn't, she knows, but she lets him anyway. Maybe, just a little bit, she likes being comforted. Maybe, just a little bit, she wishes she were drunk so she could get away with climbing into his lap and staying there, just for tonight. Because she's had a bad day. Or a bad month. But, she knows in the morning, it would complicate things even more; they'd have to sort out this friendship that they've only just gotten back to. So she stays at arm's length and doesn't come any closer.

"No one expects you to settle," he says.

"I should have taken the job in Chicago, shouldn't I?" she says. "Maybe that's what's wrong with me."

"Robin," Barney says. "Robin. You belong in New York. That's it." He refills his glass and takes a gulp.

"But it was a job as a real anchor on a real news show not on at 4am," she says. "I feel like I missed my chance now. I turned it down. For a guy who wouldn't turn a job down for me."

"It was in _Chicago_," Barney says as if that one little phrase made all the sense in the world, as if no one would ever move to Chicago for their dream job.

She gives him a look that says as much.

"Listen, Robin. I know you like to think of yourself as Can-a-dian, but you are a New Yorker. Don't tell the others I said that because Lily still thinks you're only 75% New Yorker and Marshall had to agree with her because she controls if they have sex or not. Ted conceded 90%. But you are a New Yorker. And Chicago is not New York," he explains.

Now, she knows for certain he has had too much to drink. The rhythm of his voice is off, the way he is almost slurring his words together, the hand that is still trailing her hair from her scalp to where it falls on her shoulder.

"They have all that wind and their pizza is all thick and fat and they don't sell bagels on the street corners, just hot dogs, and hot dogs are not a breakfast food. And their train system makes no sense. You are a hundred times better off not in Chicago than in Chicago. And you are a million times to the bazillionth power better off in New York than Canada. Screw Canada. And you have us here. And New York. And Maury Povich. The end. Am I drunk?" Barney asks.

Robin can't help herself, she laughs, "I think so." It seems like the first time in at least a few days where it hasn't felt like a lie. Maybe this is the way it is supposed to be: Robin post catharsis. Robin okay without armor.

Somehow, after this talking, she feels different. She does her best to quell her father's voice in her head, the one that drones on about being practical and making something of herself, about working for the pay-off. She's been waiting seven years almost and it is still not coming. But she knows, as she always has, that what she's going through right now won't be forever. You don't spend forever in these low points. Something will change and she's just here, in New York, waiting for it, making the best of what she has now.

"I won the race!" she remembers. She's surprised that it is Barney, of all people, who reminds her of all the things she has here but hasn't been thinking about.

"You did," Barney says, now touching her face, her shoulders, her neck. "You won the race." He leans in, like maybe he's going to kiss her.

"Barney," she forces herself to say, knowing he's drunk and well, that he's drunk or kind of drunk. He doesn't know what he's doing, maybe. And they just got back to being real friends, for the first time since they were together. He wouldn't want to ruin it again. But, deep down, she knows if she let him, he would. Something in the way he's still touching her. So she says, "What are you—?"

He stops. He pulls his hand away, sits back and straightens his tie. That reflex of his.

"I'm drunk, aren't I?" he says again. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I just… never mind. I should go. Ted. Ted's coming back soon, isn't he?"

"Yeah," she says. "He should be."

Barney stands up a little wobbly and reaches out to the couch to steady himself.

"Are you going to be okay going home?" Robin asks him. "You could stay on the couch if you want."

"Please," he says, walking to the door in a nearly-straight line. "I'm awesome. I'll be fine." He opens it and looks outside, probably to see if Ted's there. He isn't. Barney turns and asks, "You okay?"

"Yeah. I think I am." She pauses. "I feel a lot better getting all that off my chest. Thanks for… speaking to me again after threw that glass at you. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to really throw it at you."

"Don't worry about it Scherbatsky." He's smiling at her. "See ya tomorrow."

"See you," she says. And as he's halfway down the hall, she adds, "Thanks."


	4. Part 4

There are a few weeks that go by where Robin almost feels normal. Where she applies for jobs and when they don't call her back, she doesn't get feel the world coming to an end around her. Where she lives for the moments she doesn't spend on air, just sitting in the booth at McLaren's with her friends. Where she doesn't think about what might have been if she had gone to Chicago or if Don hadn't. Where she pretends that idiotic commercial doesn't exist.

She spends some of her free afternoons with Lily, shopping for clothes and shoes that Lily keeps complaining won't fit once she gets pregnant. Robin wonders _why get pregnant then?_ until Lily starts talking about babies and pregnancy and Robin realizes she's only complaining to have another excuse, whether on purposeful or not, to talk about babies and pregnancy. But she tries her hardest to say everything right, tells Lily _too bad_ and _it'll fit afterwards_.

On the days Marshall and Lily don't show at McLaren's, Robin spends her evenings with Barney and Ted. They talk, watch bad movies on cable, and drink, mostly. Robin doesn't get angry anymore at Barney for asking how she is, and is content that his repeated question is the only reference either of them make to the day (and night?) where Robin let her armor fall down in front of him.

But then, after the museum party, things change.

Now, it's Barney who is pretending, who has erected a shield of impenetrable armor around himself, Barney who made her talk to him but won't talk to her.

Robin isn't sure exactly how she feels about this. Part of her wants to sit Barney down and tell him that he can talk to her. She wants to make plans to go find his father-uncle, even if she has to take off work, rent a car, strap Barney into the passenger seat and drive clear across the United States of America to wherever his father-uncle is hiding. Because she knows, in a way, that he might be out there somewhere waiting for Barney to find him. But part of her understands the need to keep his feelings close.

She imagines the way he must be playing back every interaction with his father in his head, looking for hints as to why he left or maybe the one moment where an older Barney would have known Jerry was his father, or even searching for something he might have said or a certain way he might have ruffled his hair or a smile on his face that showed he loved his son, no matter his reasons for leaving. Robin understands this. Having dragged forward memory after childhood memory of her own father trying to convince herself that his intentions with her were good even if his actions weren't, that he loves her but doesn't know how to show it, Robin really understands.

It's why she can't forget the feel of that first hockey injury and always finds herself thinking about it. It's why she chose, in high school, to keep playing hockey with the boys instead of switching to a girl's sport like badminton or cheerleading. It's why she threw herself too hard at her opponents, at the ice, why she took up guns and hunting, why she once at fourteen left a goodbye note on her desk and stayed out late alongside the train tracks to see if he would come for her (he didn't read it). It's why she's been attracted to dangerous men since she was sixteen and has that drive to be something. It is also why she, as an adult, finally left home, telling herself at the time that she was leaving to free herself from her father's hold over her, but in her heart, she knew she wanted him to stop her. His words "It won't be easy," reverberated in her skull long after she had boarded the plane for New York; they were the single closest thing she got to the "don't go" she was looking for. Robin has spent most of her life waiting (in vain) to hear her father's voice asking if she can stand, if she's okay, if she needs help, waiting for a tone, a word, a crease in his brow, anything that would mean he loves her, his daughter.

If Barney were to talk to anyone about Jerry, it should be Robin. She would understand. She would really understand. But, he doesn't; he stays quiet, creating all this new tension between them. And he has stopped asking how she is; probably thinking it gives her more reason to return the question. She feels like they're on opposite sides of something big and she doesn't like it.

So she corners him one night while they're sitting in the booth after Ted has already left for class and after Marshall and Lily have gone back to their apartment.

"Talk to me." She says it pleadingly, looks him in the eye to show him that for some reason, she needs this.

When he tells her, "No, I can't," brushes her off, and stands to go to the bar for a drink, she goes back upstairs by herself, feeling like she's doing the wrong thing, feeling like she should respect his decision to not talk about it. But she can't ignore this imbalance between them. And it's been hurting her, though she pretends it doesn't, that he won't talk to her.

So Robin packs her favorite gun, leaves her phone on her bed, and goes to a different shooting range across town. She wants to be gone when Ted gets back and stops in at McLaren's to meet up with her and Barney for one last drink. She wants them, selfishly, to wonder where she is. Right now, it feels good running away like this, completely alone and undiscoverable in New York City. She could be anywhere. In the taxi, while looking out the window at the lights of the buildings blurring together, the thought of disappearing gives her a rush.

This range is smaller and more crowded than her usual place, but she doesn't mind. She pays for a few extra clips at the counter and stuffs them into her purse. Just holding the gun in her hand, safety on, calms her. It gives her something else to think about.

Robin aims the gun, feeling its weight in her hands, and pulls the trigger. She lives for the recoil, that aftershock. She knows before she looks that she has hit her target. She goes through a few clips, reloading them without thinking, without pausing to catch her breath. She takes down target after target, feeling the rush of adrenaline course through her, riding on its high.

She doesn't stop until she reaches into her purse for ammo and realizes she's run out. In the booth next to her, a man shouts over the bursting sound of firearms around them. "Wouldn't want to get in your way."

He laughs and she laughs too, aware now that she not only looks overdressed for the shooting range (heels? come on Robin!), but also that she's been so completely focused that she can't even remember how long she's been there. A few minutes? An hour? It's hard to say.

"Are you aiming at someone in particular?" the man asks her. "Or maybe, all men as a collective? Because if that's the case, then I guess I won't ask you out for a drink after all."

She laughs, looking him over now. He's tall, dark-haired, looks like he could stand a few rounds of backyard ice hockey, and is apparently a gun enthusiast. He looks her type.

"No one in particular. Just blowing off a little steam," she says.

"Well, then, would you have a drink with me? If you've finished here, I mean."

"Sure," she says.

"There's a bar just outside." Noticing his accent, she smiles again.

"Canadian?" she asks.

He nods and responds, "You too?"

They exchange names, and then he, Dylan, squints at her a bit before saying, "Hey, you're Robin Sparkles, aren't you?"

Robin nods and an embarrassed look crosses her face. She wonders if it's a deal-breaker or not.

"Robin Sparkles in New York City," the man continues, looking at her with a kind of is-this-really-happening sort of fascination.

As a joke, she holds the empty gun up to her head and pulls the trigger.

"Whoa, whoa, hey!" he shouts, stepping toward her.

"It's empty. Plus, the safety's on." she says. Great, she just freaked him out. If being an ex-pop star wasn't bad enough. She puts the gun back into her purse and apologizes.

"Don't tell me you came to New York to get away from being Robin Sparkles."

"Among other things," she answers. "I'm trying to become a serious journalist. It was impossible in Canada, considering everywhere I interviewed, they wanted to hear "Let's Go to the Mall" and wouldn't take me seriously."

"Better luck in New York then, eh?"

"Not really. Are you living in New York?"

"Vacation. I'm in New York City for a few more days."

"Homesick already?" she asks.

"How'd you know?"

"You're standing in a shooting range. Aren't you supposed to be seeing the city?"

"I already took a tour of the Empire State Building, saw where the Twin Towers were, and I went to Times Square. Then I ran out of ideas."

"Have you had New York style pizza?"

"Twice," he tells her.

She laughs. "Let's just go get that drink then."

They end up in a bar where Robin has never been before. It's fairly empty, being a Wednesday night in the middle of November. Dylan orders a gin and tonic and Robin asks for the same.

As they take their drinks slowly, he talks about home and tells her she's the first friendly person he's met. No one on the street apologizes for bumping into anyone or smiles as they pass by.

"That's New York," she tells him. "That's just the way it is."

"I don't think I could live here," he says. "How do you do it, Robin?"

"It's hard sometimes. There's this Canadian bar, The Hoser Hut, where I go when I get homesick. But it's still hard. I haven't seen my mom in seven years." She takes a sip.

"Seven years."

The conversation turns to other things. She finds out he is a pediatrician from Calgary. She asks why he is on vacation in New York City alone and his face changes. It makes her wish she didn't ask. But he tells her quickly and awkwardly about a failed engagement and needing to get away for a while. He gives her the woman's name, Anne and looks away a few moments; Robin wonders if he's trying to hide tears or control his breathing. Normally, a situation like this would send her running, but she sees a little of Ted post-Stella in Dylan, and maybe a little of herself. Robin post-Ted post-Barney post-Don.

She considers telling him about Marshall and Lily and how their engagement-breakup ended in a wedding. But, she doesn't know him enough to tell if the story would upset him more or make him feel better, and she doesn't know what this Anne did, so she keeps it to herself.

They order more drinks and talk about their jobs. Robin mentions her bad commercial and Dylan thinks it's hilarious. They start laughing at everything and that's when Robin knows she's going to end up in bed with him by the end of the night. He's alone in New York City on vacation; she is alone, disappeared for the evening. It isn't as bad as sleeping with the Naked Man or the half a dozen others she has slept with, names forgotten. She'll remember Dylan.

Soon enough, Robin feels herself slowly straddling that line between sober and not, both of them already on their forth drinks. She's leaning against the table, her foot bumping his every so often.

That's where she is when the conversation comes full circle. He asks what was bothering her so much that she could go through six clips without noticing it. She sits for a while, wondering how much she should tell this stranger who she will probably never see again after tonight.

"A friend," she starts, "just found out some news. I know he's upset, but he won't talk about it. It's more complicated than that, I guess, but that's the more abridged version."

"I'm sorry about that," Dylan says. She smiles at his Canadian pronunciation. It makes her miss home. "Maybe your friend will come around."

"Maybe."

They stay at the bar a while longer, until nearly midnight, until he asks her, like she knew he would, to come back to his hotel room. Without hesitation, she agrees. She needs this, she tells herself. All of a sudden, she wants to put more bodies between her and the memory of Don's. She had Max for a while, but now she thinks more bodies, bodies she later won't be able to put names to, would give her something she needs, even something as simple as knowing she is desirable, some kind of power and control in a world where she has none.

They take a taxi; Dylan grabs her hand as they walk out to it. During the ride, she fumbles drunkenly with the collar of his shirt, moving it out of the way so she can put her lips to his neck. He has his head tilted back and he's touching her hair and breathing. This is what Robin has missed, this power she gets from men, the way it makes her forget everything else.

The pull up at the hotel, a Marriot somewhere near Times Square, exactly the place a tourist would stay. She follows him to the elevator and down the hall to his room, where they push past his open suitcases and onto the bed.

It's kind of sloppy, their first kiss, because they are a little drunk. She traces her fingers along his arms, puts her mouth on his ear, then back to his lips; she wants him to need her. He tastes like gin and tonic, tastes like her.

He takes off her shirt and pants. As he sheds his own, she unclasps her bra for him and though they kiss each other roughly, breathing heavy, he seems hesitant to do anything else. She feels him putting his hands on her, touching her breasts, her neck, her shoulders, between her legs. But it isn't the same as feeling his hands on her, the way it should feel; its feeling how hesitant and unsure he is, how he seems not to want this, how she doesn't really either anymore. She's just going through the motions. Robin all of a sudden feels too self-aware, telling herself to run her hands along his chest or to open her mouth wider. Her eyes are open: taking in the dark and empty room, his suitcases with the clothes inside of them still folded, the souvenirs he's bought on a table next to the window, the thin floral comforter that feels scratchy against her bare skin, and how sad this all feels, and how wrong.

That feeling of power she had on the ride over is lost. It makes her realize that's all this was and she already regrets it. It's that feeling that usually starts the next morning when she wakes up in bed with someone whose name she barely remembers, but it's starting now. They're using each other. Not for sex, but for something else, and the thought makes her sick, makes her want to curl up in her blanket at home and stay there.

She pulls away. They are both silent for what feels like five minutes. She covers herself with her hands and now they're just two strangers lying in bed naked trying not to look at each other.

"I'm sorry. I've ruined it," he says at last.

"It's okay," she says even though it isn't.

The dim light coming in from outside casts the room in shadow, and Robin's glad because she doesn't want to see Dylan's face. She doesn't want to know if he has tears in his eyes, if he's wishing someone else were in her place. She doesn't want to know how much this is her fault or how wrong it feels for him. She just wants to get out of there.

"It's not that I don't find you attractive. You're very attractive. It's just, you aren't Anne," he says. "I don't think I can do this yet."

Robin can't look at him. She reaches for her pants somewhere by her feet and pulls them on.

"I know. I understand. It's fine." Still, she feels like an idiot for being here. She wonders if this has ever happened to Barney. But maybe he picks girls who are drunker than Dylan and her, past feeling, past regret.

She slides off the hotel bed and grabs her shirt, which is balled up on the ground. She pulls it over her head and stuffs her bra into her purse.

She looks at him, really looks at him. She should have known from the time he mentioned his fiancée that this wouldn't happen. She just thought… well, she doesn't know. Why is she even here? Because Barney wouldn't talk to her? What kind of sense does that make?

"I'm sorry I'm not her," she tells him.

"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't ready."

But she's already halfway out the door. She hears the springs creak beneath him as he lies back down in bed. She takes the elevator down to the lobby.

She looks like a mess, walking the walk of shame at 2am on a Wednesday morning. Her hair is mussed up and her lips feel swollen from those kisses that felt like a losing battle. At least, the lobby is empty. Or at least, nearly empty. There's a male steward at the front desk in his late forties-early fifties following her with his eyes. She remembers then she left Dylan's room without putting her bra on, so she crosses her arms over her chest. The steward smiles at her like a laugh. She tries not to care.

Outside of the lobby, in the cold November night air, she really wishes she hadn't left his room in such a rush, hadn't given into that need to get out of there as fast as she could. She had time to at least put her bra back on.

A man leaning on a corner nods his head at her in a way she doesn't like, so she fingers the gun in her purse and it makes her feel a little better as she waits for a taxi to show up. Robin tries to ignore the shadows formed by buildings and dumpsters, tries to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach, that guilt. A taxi comes by at last, now 2:15 in the morning. She has to get ready for work in two hours. It's probably better not to go to sleep, she decides. But still, she manages to nod off in the cab. When they arrive, she is jostled away by the driver tapping her knee from the front seat. "We're here," he tells her.

McLaren's is already closed, the inside dark. There's no one on the deserted street to see her stumble out of the cab or up the stairs.

Slowly, she manages to enter the apartment without knocking anything down, even in the dark. Still, she feels like a rhinoceros stomping around in the quiet apartment. She gets into her room and closes the door before turning the light on.

Her phone has two unread text messages, both from Ted. The first says, _Where are you?_ And the second, _Oh, you forgot your phone._

She has also missed about ten calls from her sister Katie six hours ago. In the voicemails, her sister sounds almost frantic. _Robin where are you? Answer! _and then, _Just call me back when you get this_.

So Robin goes into the hallway to call her younger sister back, aware that she is still drunk and that it is now almost a quarter to three and her sister is most likely asleep. Her call goes straight to voicemail so she leaves a message, "Sorry Katie. I went out and forgot my phone. You're probably asleep, so call me when you get up." She hopes she doesn't sound as drunk as she feels.

After a twenty minute power nap, Robin steps into the shower and turns the water as cold as she can handle to wake herself up. She fixes her hair, gets dressed, reapplies her makeup and is ready with just enough time to grab a coffee before heading to the station.

Robin's cell phone finally rings when she steps in the door after work.

"Hey," her sister says. "Did you really think I was going to answer your call at 3 in the morning? What were you doing up that late?"

"Umm. I had just gotten home and was about to get ready for work." Robin pulls her keys out of the door and stuffs them into her purse, which she immediately drops on the floor. She flops down on the couch and puts her feet up. She's so tired. After this, she wants to take a nap until tomorrow. God, she really needs a different job.

"What were you doing—Never mind, I don't think I want to know."

Robin ignores it. "So, what's up Katie? What did you need?"

"Just called to tell you Mom was in the hospital." Katie cuts to the chase. "She has a lump."

"Shit," Robin says, sitting up. But she can't say she's surprised. Her grandmother a decade ago, her aunt when Robin was young and again last year, and now her mother; it's something in their genes, probably. Some genetic defect. "Is she okay? Did they find out anything?"

"No, not yet. They did some kind of x-ray and they see it on there. They just don't know what it is."

"Are they going to do a biopsy, or what? When are they doing it?"

"Tomorrow. They're doing it tomorrow."

"God. Should I come home?" Robin stands up and goes to the kitchen for the bottle of scotch. She drinks straight from the bottle and doesn't recap it, just leaves it next to the sink.

"No, mom says not to. She says there's a chance that it's benign still, so it might not be anything."

"Yeah, right. Like a 1 percent chance? What did dad say?" By now, Robin is pacing around the couch.

"He said you shouldn't fly all this way just to sit in the waiting room."

Robin imagines them, her sister and her father, sitting there in silence during the biopsy. Katie would be reading a teen magazine, her dad reading a Guns Magazine or Sports Illustrated. She wonders briefly if her dad would cry or hug Katie when they get the results.

"Should I come home?" she says again. Katie doesn't answer. "Do you want me to?"

"Yeah, I want you to."

"I'll leave tonight then."

"Robin, just wait," she says. "Come when the biopsy results come back. Mom didn't want me to tell you yet. She didn't want you to get you how you get. If you show up, it might be nothing and then Dad will be mad at me."

"Seriously? Don't tell Robin, she can't handle it. What the fuck? I can handle it just fine." Robin is aware that she is almost screaming into the phone, but she's had no sleep and she can't help herself.

"Stop shouting at me. I told you, didn't I?"

"I know." Her voice quiets. "I'm not mad at you. Dad's an asshole. He acts like I'm not even part of the family."

"At least you don't have to live with him."

Robin sighs. "Just keep me updated, Katie."

"Answer your phone next time then."

"I will."

"Talk to you later. Love you."

"Love you too. Bye."

Robin just lies back on the couch with the phone still in her hand and closes her eyes. She can't fall asleep at first, thinking of her mother in a hospital gown being pushed on a stretcher to surgery. It feels like something she should be there for. She hasn't seen her mother in seven years. Sure, they talk on the phone every week and Robin has made tentative plans to go home so many times over the years, always canceling them because of her job. To go home for the first time in seven years because her mother's in the hospital makes her feel guilty. Maybe that's why they didn't want her to come back.

And she feels so weird, and now so far away. She cries, sitting there, but only a little, and only until she falls asleep.

When she opens her eyes again it is a few hours later and both Ted and Barney are standing over her, staring at her. She becomes aware that one of them had been shaking her awake pretty violently when he stops.

She makes a noise and wakes up slowly, blinking rapidly at them. She feels like she might have been drooling a little so she wipes her mouth on her sleeve. The pillow she fell asleep against left an impression on her cheek, a red line trail trailing from her eye to her jaw. She's disoriented, just roused from sleep, maybe a little hung over. She wonders if they'd leave her alone if she went into her room and pulled the shades down and the covers over her head. But judging from the way they are standing over her like that she figures probably not.

"What happened to you?" Ted asks.

Robin sits up and cracks her neck; it's loud and it hurts and even after cracking it, she is still sore. It's probably because she fell asleep in a sitting position.

"You don't want to know." She then digs her cell phone out from the cushion next to her and checks for missed calls or text messages. There are none. She exhales a burst of air through her nose and stands up.

"You look terrible," Barney says.

"Thanks Barney."

"You looked terrible this morning too, on your show. I think you were still drunk from whatever you were doing last night after you ditched me at McLaren's."

_Ditched?_ She wants to say. _You wouldn't talk to me. We were sitting in silence._ But she can't now. She turns the possibility over in her head that he doesn't remember the conversation they had the other night, that he was too drunk. He doesn't seem to have even thought of the possibility that she was upset with him. Still, she kind of is even though she tells herself she shouldn't be.

"You went to hit on girls. I got bored," she says. It's probably true enough. He did get up to go stand at the bar. "Why do you even watch it anyway?"

He shrugs. "I DVR it every day so I have something to watch at work. I ran out of real television programs."

"Funny," she says sarcastically.

"Did you come home last night?" Ted asks.

So he must not have heard her leaving the drunken voicemail on Katie's phone or running the shower for an hour straight.

"And yeah, I did for about two hours before I had to be at work. I didn't get to bed until after. I'm going on like four hours here." She feels a little like a zombie, or how she imagines a zombie must feel. Like none of the things around her are really happening, her mother, last night, just melding together like some alternate reality to her life. It makes her dizzy and she sits down.

"You left your phone here. It kept ringing all night."

"I know. I forgot it," she lies. She tries to sound convincing, but with the light and the movement of sitting back down, she's starting to feel sick. Maybe all that gin. Or the scotch. Maybe that guilt.

She pulls her hair back because it's a mess from the way she fell asleep.

"Damn, Scherbatsky, who's the lucky guy?" Barney asks.

"Huh?"

"Hickey, right-there." He pokes at a spot on her neck. "And there." He pokes again.

"Oh," she says. "Some guy, Canadian." That's all she says.

"Canadian!" Barney repeats incredulously. Only he repeats it at about three times the volume.

Robin clutches her head in her hands. "Be quiet," she tells him.

The room starts to sway, so she pinches her eyes shut. But it doesn't help. It seems even the blackness from behind her eyelids is moving back and forth, spinning around. She feels it in the pit of her stomach. Then a cold sweat breaks out on her forehead just from sitting there.

She gets up and runs to the bathroom and she must look pale or ill or something because Ted movies out of her way without her telling him to.

She barely has time to close the bathroom door behind her and put the toilet seat up before her stomach lurches and she throws up gin and scotch and whatever it was she had for breakfast. She doesn't even remember. She flushes it. She hears Ted and Barney's voices in the next room talking about her.

"Is something going on with her?" she hears Ted ask from the other room.

"I don't know," is the response. "She's been drinking a lot."

If the cold of the toilet bowl didn't feel so good on her forehead and if she trusted her insides more, she would go out there and tell them it's nothing, just that she apparently can't handle gin and no sleep combined. She stays there for a while unmoving until the dizziness starts to subside.

She hears one of them say _alcoholic_ in a whisper and she shouts, "Not any more than either of you."

When she starts to feel better, she stands at the sink and runs the cold water, rinses out her mouth.

"You alright in there, Robin?" Ted asks from outside the door.

"Just fantastic."

Ted laughs from the other side of the door and Robin takes her toothbrush out of the medicine cabinet. Black mascara is smudged under her eyes and on her cheeks from when she was crying earlier. She washes her face and fixes her hair too. Can't she just let go for one night and not come back a total disaster?

When she leaves the bathroom, Ted and Barney are sitting on the couch watching a football game on TV. She goes to the kitchen and pours herself a glass of water.

"Better?" Ted asks.

"Yeah," she says. She sits down on the couch between them.

"So what happened last night?"

"I just met this guy at the shooting range. We went out for drinks afterward."

She takes a sip of the water.

"And then you slept with him," Barney says with a wink.

"No I didn't."

"Then why do you have self-depreciating look on your face? You know, kind of guilty and a little disgusted with yourself? It is the universal morning-after look, or in your case afternoon-after."

Robin kicks his shin, but not hard. "Hey!" he says.

"I didn't sleep with him."

"Sure."

"We almost slept together and then didn't. It was really awkward. That's all."

"Sure," he says again.

"Hey, leave her alone," Ted says. "If she says she didn't sleep with him, then she didn't sleep with him." He sounds like a dad solving a squabble between his two kids. She almost expects him to ruffle their hair in that stereotypical American dad way.

"Thanks Ted."

Barney still gives her a skeptical look.

"Fine," she says.

"A-ha!"

"No. Not, fine, I slept with him. It was a fine, I'll-tell-you-what-happened fine. I didn't sleep with him."

So she tells them about how she met Dylan at the shooting range and about the bar they went to. She tells them about the fiancée and the hotel room. How sad it all seemed. But she leaves out the part where he may or may not have cried and where she may or may not have been fully dressed before running out of the hotel.

But when Barney gets up to get a drink, she elaborates to Ted. She lets it slip that she felt guilty, tells him how strange it was being there in the dark and not wanting him, but trying to want him, how wrong it all felt, but instead of wrong, she says _weird_. She keeps saying it_. It was so weird. I felt really weird._

"He was attractive," she assures him. "I just, I wasn't feeling it."

"It happens," Ted says. He puts a friendly hand on her shoulder and rubs it back and forth.

"Not to me," she says. "Ted. The Naked Man. It didn't happen with the Naked Man. And he wasn't even attractive."

"Keep your pants on then."

"Good advice." She takes another sip of her water.

"What? What did I miss?" Barney asks when he gets back to the booth with his glass of scotch.

"Nothing," both Ted and Robin say.

Soon enough, they start talking about Lily and how she is completely unable to refrain from baby talk, how she inevitably draws every conversation she's part of to babies, how it's driving everyone crazy, especially Robin. This is now a daily topic of conversation for them, like Zoey's latest attempt to make Ted's life miserable or Barney's latest stunt to get a girl to sleep with him.

And after Marshall and Lily arrive, the guys stay at the bar talking about work while Robin and Lily go upstairs to the apartment.

They stand around in the kitchen, Robin sorting through the excess of TV dinners, frozen pizzas and Ben & Jerry's ice cream for the container she opened the day before. Lily, as always, has a parenting or pregnancy magazine in her hands and is reading avidly. Every so often, she says, "Robin, listen to this," and reads a sentence or two. It's kind of ridiculous, the baby knowledge that Lily is filling herself with; she remembers when her sister Katie was first born and how all those suggestions and rules her mother had been reading to prepare just tapered off a few days after Katie came home from the hospital. What was, "Make sure your hands are sterilized before you touch the baby," changed to, "Just wipe the pacifier off on your shirt, a little dirt never hurt anybody." She's expecting the same thing to happen with Lily. It makes Lily pouring over all of these magazines seem even more useless.

She wants her friend back. And she needs to tell someone about her mom because she needs to hear someone say, "She'll be fine." She just wants to believe in those three words. And right now, she can only think of the worst.

"My mom went to the hospital last night," she says in between spoonfuls of ice cream. Her voice quiet, hardly louder than a whisper.

"Really?" Lily is still looking through the parenting magazine. She doesn't look up, but maybe she figures it's hard for Robin to talk about this. Maybe she's giving her space because she knows Robin has always had a hard time talking about things like this.

So, she continues, "There was a lump or something. They don't know what it is. It just showed up on my mom's x-ray."

Silence stretches between them for a few seconds. Robin holds her breath as if Lily were about to deliver important, life-changing news. She feels that way almost. Lily knows about Robin's aunt and grandmother, the way breast cancer has been trickling down their family tree, infecting the women at their core, attacking their very idea of womanhood. She needs Lily to tell her hope at a time like this necessary, that each woman's body is different, that this disease, this turning of the body against itself, will not take Robin's mother the way it did her grandmother. Will not reach Robin or Katie or any daughters they might have. Will not be the big expiration date that each woman in her family must face on her own when it comes down to it, bald-headed and scarred and afraid.

But Lily says, "Ooh, Robin, look at this!" And it's the magazine again. She realizes Lily wasn't listening in the first place.

"Cool," she says and eats another spoonful of ice cream out of the carton.

They go back down to the bar after that. Robin lets herself be cheered up by another ridiculous ploy of Barney's to get laid. And when he brings out Space Teens, Robin isn't at all surprised. She knew he would find it eventually. Sometimes, the reruns still play on Saturday mornings in Canada. It isn't particularly hard to find. She wonders how long he's had it for.

So the five of them plod up the stairs to the apartment and smash together onto the couch. It's a strange experience, watching Space Teens with the four of them. She show reminds of the life she left behind in Canada. It's like watching a stranger moving around in her body on television.

And it's also strange to remember being Jessica Glitter and Robin Sparkles and to remember high school and the secrets best friends share with each other. She can't help it – it makes her think of Lily, and the distance that's been growing between them ever since Lily and Marshall moved into their own apartment. It's the sort of thing that happens as people get older and their worlds get smaller.

She isn't angry at Lily for wanting a baby or for being in a healthy, stable marriage and at the point in her life where a baby is the next step. She just feels Lily pull away from her and she doesn't like it. They were confidants, once. But they haven't been for a while. Lily is so absorbed in this pregnancy thing, she hasn't noticed anything that's been going on in Robin's life. Barney noticed she wasn't alright, but Lily, Lily still doesn't.

But it's hard to watch Space Teens nostalgically when everyone is being gross about it. So she's glad when Barney takes the DVD out until it gives Lily a reason to question her about Glitter. She definitely doesn't want to talk about Jessica right now, not with the way Lily's been acting. She doesn't want to make that comparison yet. For all Lily has been annoying her lately, Robin knows she's no Jessica.

When Jessica had her baby, it was the end of their friendship. Robin didn't have anyone else. She was on her own, against the world. So maybe there were days where Jessica had reason to worry about her, to call the paramedics when Robin called her drunk from some back alleyway when she couldn't stop throwing up. It always comes back to the alcohol Robin pours down her throat like its medicine or holy water or some kind of saving grace. She uses it to take herself out of her life for a little while, like everyone else. But after she didn't feel Jessica's loss as acutely, Robin learned how to be okay alone, how to handle herself.

Still, she doesn't want to talk about it. So she goes for a walk to the Hoser Hut. She doesn't order a drink. She doesn't even want to think about alcohol any more today.

She talks with some hockey players and almost beats her own high score Deer Hunter. She starts to seriously think about going back home to Canada, not for good, but just for now. But she doesn't like the thought of going back to her parents' house if her mom has to go through chemo, doesn't want to see her mom's hair fall out or see her get sick and weak. She has this picture of her mom, this way of thinking about her; she knows it's selfish but she doesn't know how she could handle jeopardizing that image.

Someone is singing Bryan Adams on karaoke when her phone starts vibrating in her pocket. It's her aunt, her mother's sister, calling to let know what her own parents tried to keep from her. Robin goes outside to take the call.

"Katie told me," Robin says, lighting a cigarette.

"Good girl. I wasn't sure."

"Are you going to go back?"

"I will. If she's diagnosed, I will. I think your mother could use a veteran on her side, don't you?" She chuckles, but Robin doesn't join in.

Robin's aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer when Robin was just a child. She was in remission for fifteen years until it came back a year ago. So a few months ago, she had her entire right breast removed, said it was a small price to pay to keep living, said she still feels enough like a woman. Robin's aunt doesn't wear a padded bra or anything and has adopted Breast Cancer Survivor as her primary identity, attending rallies and charity events, giving speeches. In the midst of all that is going wrong in her life, Robin is really glad to know that if this turns out the way they think it will, then Robin's mother will have her sister down at the front lines with her.

She tells her aunt this in different words.

"You'll come back too, won't you? She'll want to see you."

"Yes," Robin says. "I will."

The next afternoon, after Robin's Korean massage, Katie calls. But Robin's on the subway and it's too loud, so she says, "Hold on," and gets off at the next stop.

"What's going on?" Robin asks, walking in the direction of the apartment. She's only a few blocks away.

"They're prepping mom for surgery. She's having an open surgical biopsy, I think they said. They don't want to take any chances with our family history, so they're going to take the whole mass out and test it. They said it'll be a few hours until she's out and then we have to wait a little longer for the results."

"Where's dad? Does he know you told me yet?"

"He went to the cafeteria to get us some coffee. No, but mom called Aunt Carol and she threw a fit that no one was telling you, so mom thought she was going to call you."

"Yeah, she did last night."

"Mom didn't say anything to dad though."

"This is so stupid. We can't just be a normal family, can we?"

Katie laughs. "We are a normal family," she says. Then, "Dad's coming back. I'll call you when we know something."

"Bye Katie."

"Bye."

By the time Robin reaches the apartment, she has already smoked two cigarettes.

When she arrives, Ted and Barney are sitting on the couch waiting for her. They go through the whole thing about not being able to watch Space Teens without her and because she needs something to do to pass the time until the surgery is over and Katie calls her back, Robin sits down in the living room with them.

She warns them that she'll turn it off if they make any dirty comments. And of course they do. They're Ted and Barney. They make it only a few minutes.

After she hides the tape in her room and comes back out, they're still talking about it. They want to hear the beaver song.

"Well too bad," she tells them. "You lost your privilege."

They whine for a while, but Robin does not cave. After a few minutes or maybe after they realize she isn't going to, the two of them head down to the bar. Robin says that she owes herself a nap from the day before and stays upstairs. When they leave, she calls Katie to see how it's going, but all Katie knows is that their mom is in surgery and everything is going good so far.

Then there's a knock at the door. She stuffs the pack of cigarettes into pocket of her jacket and throws it into her bedroom before opening the door. It's Lily. And despite what happened yesterday when Lily ignored her, Robin is glad to see her. She needs some kind of distraction from waiting for her cell phone to ring outside of chain-smoking on the roof.

But Lily seems to be having her own kind of crisis.

"I want to talk about babies," she says, frustrated, like it's the last straw in an argument they've been having for weeks now. But it's come out of nowhere and Robin can't deal with this right now.

She doesn't mean to blow up at Lily like she does, but she's had a long day, a rough week and she can't stop herself. Things change. She knows that. Friends don't stay as close when one of them gets married and starts a family. But still, Robin expected a gradual falling out, not for Lily to come right out and say it. It seems so childish and like so many things in her life right now, so unreal.

Robin needs another cigarette.

She guesses that Lily goes down to the bar to tell Marshall and Ted and Barney what happened because as soon as she gets to the roof and has her cigarette lit, Ted and Barney come stomping up the rickety stairs and sit down on either sides of her, three pairs of legs dangling off the side of the building.

"You okay?" Ted asks.

Robin nods and offers them both a cigarette. She takes a long drag and blows the smoke out slowly, letting the taste of it linger in her mouth.

"I can't believe Lily broke up with you," Barney says.

Robin just exhales.

Ted says, "It won't last."

"I know."

She does know, instinctively. Like how Ted and Barney's break up didn't last. There's something about the five of them, together, that's inevitable. But it doesn't make what Lily said hurt less. And it doesn't make the rest of the world any easier.

She doesn't tell them it isn't the only reason why she's out on the roof, smoking cigarette after cigarette, turning her cell phone over in her palm, waiting for it to ring.

They stay up on the roof for an hour smoking the rest of Robin's cigarettes. Barney and Ted are talking about Space Teens and Alan Thicke.

"I'm going to buy Glitter's costume," Barney says.

"Why?" Ted asks. Then thinks a second and says, "Never mind, I don't want to know."

"Since you asked," Barney starts.

Really, Robin's glad for the company.

They lay down on their backs on the roof. The asphalt is cold on their backs like the November air on their faces. The wind takes the smoke from their mouths and carries it off. Robin listens to the two of them talk.

But then her phone starts to ring. She brings it up into her line of vision.

The screen reads Katie.

Robin sits up fast and tells Ted and Barney, "I have to go." In a rush, she puts out her cigarette and tosses it into the beer bottle that's been up there as a makeshift ashtray ever since they failed smoking their last cigarette two years ago.

She is almost inside the window by the time she answers the phone.

"Hey," she says, finally out of hearing range. "Any news?"

"Not yet. Dad went to get coffee. A doctor came out a while ago and said maybe two more hours until they know. I just wanted to update you."

"Oh. Thanks. Call me when you know something?"

"Yeah, I will."

Because she doesn't feel like heading back up to the roof and because she's run out of cigarettes, Robin takes a cab to the Hoser Hut. She orders a scotch and soda and checks her phone every couple minutes even though she knows logically that Katie won't call yet.

She isn't there for very long when Lily comes up to the table where Robin has been sitting alone.

She apologizes for what happened earlier. Maybe it's the whole of the day weighing down on her, but when they hug, Robin feels nothing but relief to have her friend back. Then the guys gather around them with their arms open wide for a group hug. And it helps, it really helps. She knows they will be there for her, these four, even when everything else seems to be going wrong. It is such a profound relief.

But when the song plays and she sees Jessica up on the stage, she is angry at first. This was definitely Lily's doing, the manipulation, the sneaking, but she can't be mad at Lily anymore. She looks at Jessica; a little older than when they last saw each other, a few years after that final Christmas card. She can't be mad. And when Jessica holds the microphone out towards Robin, she goes for it. After all, this could be her last night in New York, at least for a while.

They stay at the Hoser Hut for a few drinks with Jessica before she has to leave to pick up her daughter from the babysitter.

Marshall says, "So, Robin, have any more big secrets from childhood? Did Celine Dion babysit you when you were a kid? Did you grow up next door to Bryan Adams?"

She laughs with them.

Then Robin's phone rings. Katie again. She excuses herself from the table and goes outside to answer.

"Hey," Robin says.

And before the words leave Katie's mouth, Robin already knows. She can tell from the way her sister is breathing, the quiet way she says, "Hey," into the phone, all breathy, the fact that she can hear her father talking to someone in the background.

"Oh," Robin says. It's all she can say. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth like an old sponge. She listens to Katie's voice. "Oh," she says again.

She starts walking. It's only eight pm, but the sky is already dark, has been for a few hours. It feels a lot later suddenly.

Slowly, slowly, she gets the details. They're starting her on a low dose of chemo drugs immediately; she'll have to go in for radiation five times a week for two months. She has a good chance.

"They caught it early," Katie says.

And Robin knows this is good news, but can't bring herself to feel happy about it. She remembers the first time her aunt was diagnosed, how she would lay in the guest bedroom while Robin's mother fussed over her. She didn't like to be touched, she always hurt. And after her chemotherapy drugs, she'd always feel nauseous for a few hours. Sometimes, at night, Robin would hear her crying quietly to herself.

"Oh," Robin says again. "Oh." But she doesn't cry.

The sisters lapse into silence. Robin paces back and forth outside of the Hoser Hut. She doesn't peer inside to see if her friends are in there looking out at her. She notices her dad has stopped talking to the doctor in the background, but he doesn't ask Katie for the phone or anything, not that she expects him to. Robin Scherbatsky Sr. doesn't do grief. And he certainly doesn't share grief.

"Did you see her?" Robin asks after a while.

"Not yet. She's coming out of the anesthesia soon, they said. We'll be able to see her tonight and then take her home."

"Oh."

"When are you coming?"

"Tomorrow, I guess. I'll call work tonight, take a few days off." It will be easy; the station might let her take longer off, with Becky being there and all.

"Let me know when you get in," Katie says. "I'll come and get you."

"I will. Katie, I'll let you go. I'm going to go home and start packing."

"Bye, Robin," her sister says.

"See you tomorrow."

Robin bides her time before going back in to the bar. She books a plane ticket on her phone for the next morning at ten.

It's been probably the most ridiculous week of her life. It's funny, almost. If it weren't real and just happening in a movie somewhere, it'd be funny in a you've-got-to-be-kidding kind of way. Robin walks for a few more minutes until she's sure than when she goes back in, she won't cry.

She opens the door and goes in. She notices the people around her smiling and laughing; it seems wrong to her. The bar is cloaked in a dim sort of light, but she sees the four of them sitting at the back corner table across from the bar.

She approaches slowly, hearing the end of a punch line to one of Ted's jokes. She waits until Marshall stops laughing and Barney stops rolling his eyes.

"Hey," she starts, aware, in some way, that she must look like a ghost. "I'm going home."

"I should be getting back too," Ted says. "We can share a cab."

"No," Robin says louder, clearer. "I'm going home. To Canada."

A/N: I've received lots of notifications about people adding this to their favorite stories. But only a handful of reviews? Like what you're reading? Please let me know! It's good motivation to keep writing.


	5. Part 5

A/N: Sorry this took me so long! I was finishing up National Novel Writing Month when I was first writing it, but it needed a lot of editing and I needed a break from writing. (I knitted like 3 scarves instead, but that's another story.) I was actually planning to have Robin in Canada as the entire Part 5, but I had to cut it because my word document for Part 5 In Process was getting to be like 35 pages and I wasn't even close to finished with the end portion.

Enjoy! And please leave me a review if you're reading so I know you're out there (and I'm not just spending hours on a story no one's reading).

**PART 5**

"Why would you go back to _Canada_?" Barney asks. "You've already escaped twice. You don't want your luck to run out, Scherbatsky. Imagine if you got trapped there."

Maybe he doesn't see the look she's probably had on her face since she came back inside. Or maybe he does and he's already trying to lighten the mood anyway. Lily, however, definitely notices and hits Barney on the arm.

Robin looks down at the table as she forms the words she's been thinking since she first talked to Katie about the lump two days before. But when the words come out of her mouth, they don't sound like hers. The voice, too, sounds like it belongs to someone much younger than she is.

"My mom was just diagnosed with breast cancer." She blends the words together as if rushing through them would make them easier to say, as if they would become somehow less real. "I'm going home to be with my family."

Maybe she's imagining it, but it seems everyone in the Hoser Hut stops talking at once and looks at her.

Her mother has cancer. An all-consuming hole in the ground engulfs her. Or seems to. Her mother has cancer.

When she says it aloud, the shock of it gets her: the knowledge that even though they caught it early, even though her mother has a good chance of survival, it could have just as easily been terminal; the knowledge that it still could be, one day years from now, after remission – that calm that almost cost her aunt's life. The shock that it is her mother now who has to go through the suffering her aunt barely survived and that her grandmother gave up to before Robin was born.

She doesn't look up to meet Barney's eyes, but distinctly hears him mumble, "Sorry."

Lily is the next to speak. "Are you okay sweetie?" she asks.

Robin nods. But she isn't okay enough to explain that she saw this coming or that she's just been waiting for her suspicions to be confirmed. She's only okay enough to nod and sit there and finish her scotch in long sips and feel the slow, smooth burn it leaves in its wake. It helps when Lily reaches out across the table to hold her hand and Marshall puts his hand over Lily's.

"They caught it early," Robin says. Is she telling them or trying to make herself feel better? She feels like she has to say something, since she left the diagnosis of a woman they've never met hanging like that between them. "She has a good chance of beating it."

She takes another sip of her drink and notices that all the ice has melted into it during the time she was on the phone, but drinks it anyway. She wonders if the others can tell she isn't sure whether she believes her own words or not. She doesn't look too closely at any of their faces. She doesn't want to see pity in those creases on their foreheads, eyebrows; she can't if she wants to stay strong. And she knows they're all looking at her the way friends do under these circumstances. They're looking at her as if _she_ were the one starting chemotherapy and radiation tomorrow morning. But it hurts having them look at her this way.

Ted, sitting beside her, slings his arm around her shoulder in a sort of hug. He says, "If your mom is anything like you and your sister, she'll get through this just fine. The Scherbatsky women I know are tough."

This gives Robin a mental image of her mother in the kitchen holding a spatula like a war hammer to protect Christmas cookies just out of the oven, her mother supporting Aunt Carol from her wheel chair to the car after radiation. She knows her mother is strong of heart, strong of body. But she also knows how easily that strength can fall away. She's seen it before. She's seen her Aunt Carol go hunting with a rifle slung over her shoulder just her and a guide, spend two sometimes three days hiking through frozen fields, ford streams and rivers, and come home dragging a 250-pound caribou behind her. But she's also seen her too tired to even sit up in bed, seen her bald and bruised and vomiting, seen her sleep for days, cry, plead with a God up there to just take her now, just make everything stop. Robin knows it doesn't matter how strong you are when you're fighting against your own body.

Still, more than anything, she hopes Ted is right. She looks around the table at her friends, sees that they are all watching her.

"I'm fine," she says, probably louder than necessary. She knows something in her eyes is giving her away, but she continues, "Let's get one more round."

Ted signals the waitress.

Only Barney doesn't take his eyes off Robin. He knows about her alcohol to dull the pain theory; he uses it against girls just like her. But he doesn't smile at her the way he smiles at them, she notices. When she meets his eyes and he sort of frowns, but passes her the glass of scotch anyway. Robin doesn't want to think about it.

"When do you leave?" he asks.

"Tomorrow at 11. I'll be staying in Toronto for five days."

"I don't have any meetings in the morning. Do you want me to ride with you to the airport?" Barney asks before anyone else has a chance to. His voice lacks the usual joking timber. It catches her off guard for a moment; especially when he holds her stare until she has to look away.

At first, she thinks she will turn him down. She can get to the airport on her own. She's an adult. But there's something in the way he says it that's so earnest, so well-meaning, she just can't. She sees the Barney who went to LA to bring Lily back for Marshall and who tried to cheer Marshall up after Lily left but wouldn't let him sleep with any women; the Barney who held her after her break-up with Simon and ran across New York City to see Ted in the hospital. Like he knows how hard it's going to be for her to sit in the taxi, their airplane, to be victim to her own thoughts and doubts, like he knows somehow she needs him.

So she says, "Sure. Thank you."

"No problem."

She tells him to take a taxi over around 8:00. She wants plenty of time to get through airport security.

Lily gives Barney a poignant look, but only for a second. He doesn't seem to notice and Robin can't be bothered right now to figure out what it's for.

"So, how long has it been since you've been home?" Marshall asks, taking a sip of his beer.

"Seven years," is Robin's response. "I was twenty two."

She was twenty two when she graduated college; she had planned her move to New York for months, spent hours applying for jobs, thinking everything was her big break. It was always her plan to travel. She never wanted to live in the same city in Canada for her entire life. But the fact that she's twenty nine now, almost thirty, and hasn't seen her parents since she was twenty two makes her pause.

In seven years her parents could have gone gray. Katie is now twenty years old, a sophomore in college. A million things could have happened in their lives since she last saw them. She might have been twenty two the last time she will ever have seen her mother healthy again. This weighs on her and she feels suddenly, overwhelmingly, how much she has missed of their lives.

And for what? She works essentially the same type of job she started with at Metro News One. It wasn't the launching pad to something better she had imagined it was. It will look to everyone like the time she's spent in New York hasn't gotten her anywhere. What's worse is it's true.

She realizes, in a big ah-ha moment, then that her friends have all been home to see their families, all of them, except her. While for others it takes only holidays, weddings, extra vacation time to go visit their families, it takes a tragedy for Robin Scherbatsky.

"Twenty two," she says again and reaches for her glass. She takes a long drink and tries not to start crying. She knows they're all looking at her, watching her unravel though she tries her hardest just to concentrate on breathing, tasting, swallowing.

Ted squeezes her shoulders again. "It's okay," he tells her.

Today, now, Robin feels brave or stupid or just guilty and self-depreciating, so she meets his eyes and says, "No, it isn't." She inhales and looks down again at her hands curled around the cold glass.

None of them say a word. Because she's right. She knows it.

"What kind of daughter…?" Robin breaks off there, unable to finish the thought. She shakes her head and hopes no one notices when her tears make little splashes against the table.

She can't stop. She can't deal with this, not on top of everything else. Her family, herself, this guilt she can't seem to escape that keeps coming back for everything. She should have known it would happen, after her aunt, when everyone in the family came to the conclusion that it must be genetic: a mother and then her oldest daughter; it was only logical that later, it would be the youngest. She should have been there when her mother first felt the lump, when she went in for a mammogram, for the biopsy. She should have forgotten the fight with her father, all the nights she cried or drank too much became of him, because this is about her mother. She should have been a better daughter for her mother's sake.

"Robin," she hears Lily say. Lily grips her hand tighter.

Robin just shakes her head and tries to breathe. Tries to calm down.

She is crying in The Hoser Hut. She can't believe it. People are probably looking at her. She might be hyperventilating. Someone hands her a napkin and she blows her nose on it as quietly as she can. But it doesn't stop that heavy feeling in her chest or the tears she can't control. She has that urge she sometimes gets to break things, smash them to pieces, to hurt or get hurt. Her hands are already in fists, her nails digging into her palms. Breathing comes hard now.

"Robin," a voice says. "Do you want to go outside?"

Ted is already out of his seat with his hands on her shoulders.

She just nods. Outside would be better.

"Come here," he says to her and she stands. He says something to the others that Robin can't fully hear.

Ted puts his arm around her and leads her out of the bar. They walk a ways away from the door, to the stoop of some building that closed hours ago. The world feels different tonight, like nothing is real, like a dream she can't wake from. The air feels too cold as she breathes it in too quickly, too cold for her lungs.

"Listen to me," Ted says. "You have to calm down."

She tries but her breaths come fast and with not enough air. She is still sobbing.

"Cigarette?" she manages.

"No. I don't have any."

She cries, wiping her eyes with her hands.

"Robin." His voice is pleading. "It's okay. Don't cry."

Ted is crouched down on the stairs in front of her, rubbing her back. Then she feels his lips press down on her forehead for a second. His arms wrap the whole way around her and she relaxes into him, crying softly now, wetting his shirt.

"It's going to be okay," he tells her.

They are still hugging and she is still crying when the others finish paying the bill and come outside to find them. Lily sits down next to Robin and hugs her and Ted both. Then Marshall and finally Barney join in and she is covered in a sea of arms and bodies. She calms enough with all of them around her to stop crying and get a grip on herself.

"I'm sorry," she says after her breathing has returned to normal. She still isn't looking at any of them. She wipes her under eyes with her fingers and they come away smudged with eyeliner and mascara.

"You don't need to apologize," Lily says, petting Robin's hair. "It's okay."

Robin doesn't know what to say; she feels like she's made a fool of herself in front of her friends. She just wants this day to be over. The streetlights are on, the moon is out, the air has that night chill to it. She wants to go back to the apartment and dream that none of this is happening. She is relieved when Ted says they should all be getting back.

Marshall goes to the curb to hail an approaching cab; his shadow casts over the rest of them and the taxi comes to a stop alongside him. "You guys take it," he says. "We'll get the next one."

"Thanks," Ted responds. He helps Robin to her feet, despite her grumbling that she is fine and can stand on her own.

Marshall and Lily envelop her in another bear hug that almost knocks her over and tell her they love her and to call if she needs anything. It brings her, somehow, to childhood.

"You're going to be good parents," Robin tells them though she isn't sure why. Then she apologizes again for causing a scene and looking like a crazy person.

"You didn't look like a crazy person. Everyone has a bad day once in a while. And why do you care what those bunch of strangers think about you?"

They aren't strangers, she wants to say. They're Canadians.

"But, it's the Hoser Hut," is all she can come up with.

Marshall tells her again, "It happens to everyone."

But it shouldn't happen to Robin. Her world shouldn't be this shaky all the time and she shouldn't be so perpetually close to falling apart. All she wants is a little stability, for just one thing maybe to go right. She can't help wondering if there was something she did to deserve everything getting so screwed up. But nothing comes to mind. She doesn't say any of this, just stands quietly letting Lily and Marshall hug her. It isn't the kind of thing you say face to face on outside a bar at 10pm, if you say it at all.

"Let us know when your plane lands," Lily says when they both release her. "I'll have my phone on at work."

"I will," Robin replies.

Ted holds the door open while Barney and Robin climb into the backseat. They end up seated with Robin in the middle.

Maybe because of all the crying, Robin's head is throbbing at the base where it connects to her neck. She rubs at it with four fingers, knowing she won't get any relief from the headache until she takes something. There just always has to be something. It's this year, she thinks, nothing has gone right. She tells herself 2011 will be different, it has to be.

She must make a noise or something because both Barney and Ted turn to look at her. Then Barney slides his arm around her and pulls her toward him so that her head rests against his chest, like the night after she got drunk and threw that glass at him, like he did when Simon broke up with her. Ted watches and then turns to look out his own window. She inhales slowly, letting the scent of Barney linger with her before exhaling. He says nothing, even his breathing seems purposefully quiet. For those first few minutes, they both look out the window.

Robin is lost in her own thoughts, creating a mental checklist of the things she will need to pack.

It is Ted who breaks equilibrium. "Robin?" he says. "Is your mother starting her treatment this week?"

"Tomorrow." Robin informs him from her place against Barney's chest.

He asks even more questions: what kind of treatment are they starting her mother on? Is there anything he can do to help? Does she want one of them to go to Canada with her?

And Robin answers the best she can.

Of course she would want one or all of them to come with her to Toronto, to keep her distracted from the situation at hand, but she can't say yes to that. This time spent going home is sacred, in a way, just for her family, just for her mother.

"I'll be okay," she says. This is something she has to do alone.

Still, she is scared to face her family after so much time has passed. She wonders if her mother will be disappointed that even with the past seven years of birthdays and holidays, the breast cancer diagnosis was the thing to finally bring Robin home. Her breathing begins to quicken again and the familiar lump in her throat comes back. Still, she tries to breathe, tries not to cry.

Barney must notice the way she tenses up because the arm he has around her starts to move in circles on her shoulder slowly.

Robin focuses on Barney's heartbeat as it rumbles against her, lets the steadiness of it calm her down. It reminds her of when they were dating how they would fall asleep with their arms tangled around each other, the skin of his chest warm against her face. She breathes in.

They reach the apartment in a few more minutes. When they come to a stop and Robin sits back up, Barney withdraws his arm from behind her.

"See you tomorrow," Barney says as Ted and Robin climb out of the cab, giving them a sort of salute, awkwardly.

Robin spends the rest of the night packing. When she finally falls asleep it is to dreams that wake her, heart-pounding, but disappear from her mind as soon as she begins to remember them. In the middle of the night, she gets up to draw her curtains closer together so the New York City lights stop casting their shadows over the bedroom; in the middle of the night, she kicks her blankets off and later sits up to pull them back on; in the middle of the night, she gets a drink of water and a few hours later goes to the bathroom. When the morning finally comes, she feels as if she hasn't slept at all.

But she gets out of bed and into the shower, has a quick breakfast with Ted before he leaves, and finishes packing a few last-minute items. Barney calls her cell phone after a few minutes to say he's coming up and to ask if he should have the taxi wait.

Because she's been moving so slowly and drowsily all morning, she isn't ready to leave yet.

She's in her room when he lets himself in and says, "Morning, Scherbatsky," sounding way too awake for 8am. He inches her bedroom door open just enough to peer inside at Robin surrounded by piles of clothes that didn't quite make it into her suitcase.

"Morning," she says back.

"Are you going back for five days or five months?" he asks.

She eyes the piles of clothes again and repeats, "Five days, five days," to herself. She picks up a red sweater out of her suitcase and tosses it into her open dresser drawer. "I don't know what to wear," she confesses. "I haven't seen my parents in seven years. I know it doesn't matter what I wear. But it feels like it should."

Barney doesn't answer and she doesn't look at him, can't. She's been doing this a lot lately, and she doesn't like it; it's been the longest time since she felt like herself. She can't meet anyone's eyes. And from the silence in the air, she knows it bothers him; she's no fun like this. She has tried all her life not to be this girl. And even before this news, this cancer, she was falling apart, not sleeping, not doing anything right.

She sits on the edge of her suitcase to smash its contents down before zipping it shut.

Barney is still standing in her doorway watching. Finally, he says, "How long did you know?"

"Officially? Or unofficially?"

"Unofficially?"

"Two days."

"Oh," he says simply and then is quiet.

And for some reason, it's necessary that she fills his silence, so she says, "They had the biopsy yesterday. She found the lump the day before that."

"Sorry," he tells her. But he says it like it's an apology for something he's done wrong, instead of some rogue mutation in her mother's DNA that he's had nothing to do with.

"It's fine. Don't worry," she stammers. "I just… I don't know what to say to her. I mean, my parents didn't want me to know about the lump… until it was diagnosed. But Katie told me anyway."

"What? Why not?"

"They didn't want to worry me, they said. They thought I might… But I'd rather worry and have the chance it might be nothing than have it come without warning. I was prepared for it, when the results came back. I already knew." That's where she leaves it. She can't mention out the part about having no doubt that the lump was cancerous, about breast cancer hiding in the branches of her family tree like some shadowy assassin, about that mutated gene passed from mother to daughter she's read about and has wondered if it is in her, too.

If it isn't hard enough worrying about her mother, she's worrying about Katie, worrying about herself, wondering what the point of all of this is if she's predetermined to die in her thirties/forties a failed new anchor or suffer through it by chance and emerge, scarred, some new person. Even getting it or not is just another thing she can't control.

She lifts her suitcase off the bed and grabs her purse from the floor, then looks around the room to be sure she has everything.

"Need help?" Barney asks. He's holding an arm out towards the suitcase and this is definitely strange, Barney asking to help.

"No, I got it," she says. "I'm fine."

Robin lets him hold the door open for her as she flings her bags in the cab and goes in after them. She tells the driver to take them to the JFK. Barney climbs into the backseat with her and they sit in silence for the first few minutes. Why did he even want to come? It's not like she needed help with anything. She drums her nails on the hard edge of the suitcase.

"Are you going to be okay? Going home?" Barney asks after a while. "Didn't you say once that your dad was the last person you'd ever want to see?"

She laughs because she remembers putting it like that once. "I did say that. I'm pissed at him already and I'm not even home yet."

She thinks a minute before continuing, "But I'm sort of hoping he'll have changed since I last saw him. Or since the diagnosis." She wonders what reaction he'd have, if any, to Robin and Katie's increased risk for developing breast cancer, wonders if it were her instead of her mother going through chemo right now, if he'd treat her any different.

"It takes a lot for someone to change who they are."

She looks at Barney because she can't believe he's giving her advice. It seems more realistic to her that the cabbie just threw his voice. But it was Barney, Barney's voice, Barney looking in her eyes. And Robin feels in that moment, he's talking about more than just her father.

"I'm not getting my hopes up or anything," she says. "No expectations, just the same asshole who raised me."

Barney reaches across the seat and squeezes her hand. The contact is brief, only a few seconds, and then he's straightening his tie and point out the window at some 7 whose skirt has blown up, revealing her bright pink panties. "Look at that," he says, as the woman struggles to push it down. "Is this really happening?"

Even the cab driver laughs and slows down. He honks the horn and Robin can't help but laugh too.

Barney walks her through the crowded airport up to security. Then they just stand there, looking at each other, Robin's bags in a pile at her feet. Neither of them are really the type of people for goodbyes. Even temporary ones.

"I hope you didn't miss anything important at work," she says, awkwardly.

"Please."

Then they're standing there again, not exactly looking at each other.

"Thanks," she says at the same time he mumbles, "Good luck." They both laugh. Why is this so weird?

"Bye, Robin," he says and wraps his arms around her in one fluid motion.

She puts her arms around him too and rests her head on his shoulder. She breathes in the way he smells. They stand there at the gate holding each other for what seems to Robin a long time; she has her eyes open, watching the people around them pass by. But she doesn't want to let go and he doesn't seem to want to either. It feels good, the solidness of him, the warmth of his arms around her. In that moment with her sleeplessness, she almost tells him so.

"Barney," she says, then clears her throat, "Thank you."

They both pull away and Barney shakes his head at her. She reaches down to pick up one of her bags. He fixes his sleeves even though they look fine.

"Did I ever tell you about the day I joined the mile high club?" he asks her loudly.

"Barney," she says, taken aback at first by his shift in character, but then grateful for it, for the chance to pretend she's just taking a trip, that she hasn't cried on his shoulder twice in the past month. "And yes. Yes you did. More than once, actually."

"Great story," he says more to himself than to Robin. "You should give it a try." Then he says, "Have a good trip. Let us know when you get there."

"I will."

"And call us if you feel yourself becoming _too_ Canadian. We'll come get you."

"Okay," she laughs.

"And if you need anything or just want to talk, I'll be here. I mean, we'll be here. So call," he says.

"I will, Barney. I have to go now though or I'm going to miss my flight." She hugs him again quickly. "Bye," she says and heads towards security.

"Okay, okay. Bye," he calls after her. She doesn't look back to see him stand there a few minutes watching her before leaving the airport.

Even after making her way through the vigorous security checks, Robin is still about 45 minutes early. To kill time, she stops at the Duty Free store before boarding. She buys an overpriced New York mug for her mother and picks up a pack of cigarettes for herself.

On the plane, Robin has an aisle seat. The woman sitting next to her is wearing a Canucks jersey. Robin smiles at her and the woman smiles back. After the plane takes off, she leans her seat back and closes her eyes. She lets the wind-sound of the plane lull her into an almost-sleep.

She falls asleep picturing her parents' house in Toronto: the big entryway with its grandiose design, how Katie probably repainted Robin's old bright purple bedroom, the small Victorian-style sitting room full of inherited furniture where as a child she was instructed not to touch anything, the giant kitchen table that looks like it belongs in a castle somewhere in Europe, her parents' four-poster bed where she imagines her mother holed up with a book and a stack of old VHS tapes and her knitting needles.

The last time Robin stood under its high ceilings and long hallways was for her going away party, her mother's magnum opus of parties. She spent all day cooking the entrée and side dishes and baking treats for the family and friends who would assemble at their house that evening. Robin and Katie were sent to the store every few hours to pick up items like mushrooms and baker's chocolate and another dozen eggs.

Her first thought upon waking is of her mother. How strange will it be not to see her bustling about, getting into everyone's business the way she does, singing the national anthem as she cooks, getting tipsy after a single glass of wine with dinner and dancing as she loads the dishwasher.

Then she thinks of her father. Waiting on her mother maybe. Standing by her side that calm and silent presence Robin remembers him as. She wonders, not for the first time, what her mother could have seen in a man like that. Or if maybe around her mother only he's this other person Robin has never met.

She still does know what she will say him, the man who gave her his name and raised her, for whom nothing she did was ever good enough. She would have preferred a physically absent father over hers. At least with an absent father she could have pretended there was some reason he had to leave—a childhood love he had to pursue, a dangerous job he couldn't involve them in, the witness protection program, the military, a secret history as a superhero. But Robin is through making excuses for her father, for his distance. There is a time in everyone's life when they have to start being accountable for themselves, regardless of what happened to them as a kid or how they were raised. Her father's has long passed.

She still wishes, though, she knew why he is the way he is. But in all her life, in all her playing back memories, she has never found the slightest clue.

When she leans forward in her seat, Robin can see the Toronto skyline approaching; how different it is from New York's. The air here too is different: colder, clearer, with a faint gust of snow already in the air. The pilot announces their arrival in English and then in French. She sees Toronto Islands and the CN tower and feels a sense of belonging that New York hasn't given her yet, a sense of homecoming.


	6. Part 6

A/N: I'm guessing this story is going to take me a lot longer than I previously thought. I hope you're all enjoying it. I'm enjoying writing it. I keep telling myself writing (and finishing!) a novel-length fanfiction piece is going to be the self-esteem booster I need to motivate myself to write a real, live, original novel that I can submit to publishers for rejection letters on pretty stationary. But one step at a time...

* * *

After the plane lands, Robin waits a long time to stand up and collect her things:

First, she takes a deep breath, seated with her bag and jacket on her lap, and looks out the window at the low clouds hovering over Toronto bay. She knows what's next, what's waiting for her there.

Her mother has cancer. And nothing from the past few months matters anymore; not her job or her fight with Lily or Barney or that guy she almost slept with for the wrong reasons. Instead of melding together and weighing her down, they dissipate like a slow haze. _There's an expression for this_, she thinks to herself, grasping for it. It takes her a few seconds longer than she thinks it should to come up with the phrase:_ Putting things into perspective._

So Robin sits there, thinking about it. She lets the woman beside her pass first into the aisle. She turns her cell phone on to a message from Katie that reads _I'm here_; she pictures her sister (sixteen with a self-important look on her face and boyfriend with a faux-hawk on her arm.) She picks up her bags and sets them down again. She thinks about standing up and going out there to meet her sister, sees herself doing it. But she can't will her legs to lift her body. She is, though she hates to admit it, scared, guilty, hesitating. She sends a text to Ted, Lily, Marshall, and Barney that says _Arrived in Toronto_. She watches the screen for a few minutes as their replies come back to her: _Have a good time with your family, Call if you want to talk, Thanks for letting us know, _and_ Good luck._

Robin waits until she is last, absolutely last, before looking around at the empty seats and putting on her jacket, before hoisting her purse over her shoulder and following the last of the line toward the exit.

The crowd bends toward the immigration counter. Talking, laughing. Robin moves past them and waves her Canadian passport at the attendant. She is then ushered toward customs and the baggage claim. She wishes there were winding hallways to get lost in, something to further delay going home and seeing her mother as a shadow of her mother, but there isn't.

Robin spots her own overfull suitcase before she sees Katie struggling to drag it off the conveyer belt, her sister in a grown woman's body. It's surprising how much older those few inches and a new haircut make her baby sister look, how much like Robin and her mother. She's twenty years old now – only two years younger than Robin when she first left home. Will Katie leave one day, too? Robin can't say she knows her enough to tell.

She shouts her sister's name and Katie turns; even from across the room, Robin can see her sister's eyes are red and the skin around them is splotchy, but she can't see evidence of the tear stains she knows are there streaked across her sister's cheeks.

It makes Robin feel like she was spared something.

She is aware, acutely, that Katie spent hours in a hospital waiting room surrounded by boxes of Kleenex and old magazines, in that smell of sanitizing alcohol. Robin feels guilty then glad then guilty again.

She slings her purse over her shoulder as she approaches; then the two sisters embrace in the middle of a crowd, are almost pulled along with it unnoticing. She hears Katie sniffle against her shirt and in response, Robin rubs her back, remembering when Katie was her baby sister with a scraped knee or a missing stuffed beaver or a bruised ego, remembering that she is the big sister.

"Katie," Robin says. She tries to sound comforting, tries to channel Lily. "What's wrong?"

Her sister says nothing at first, only squeezes Robin tighter. And Robin squeezes her back. The thought crosses her mind that they are both too old now to cry, to show this kind of weakness. She makes herself ignore it and her own eyes begin to water.

"I don't know," Katie answers finally.

But speaking seems to renew whatever feelings made her cry in the first place, because when they pull apart, her eyes fill up again and Robin reaches forward and touches a strand of Katie's hair. She doesn't know what else to do.

Then Katie leans down and picks up one of Robin's bags. Robin grabs the other and they pass through the crowds and out the door.

"I just hope the treatment works," Katie says in between sniffles. "The chemo makes her really sick. She didn't want any of us to touch her."

"It's okay. It's just the chemo. She won't be on it forever."

"But, it's Mom. It's hard to see her like this. And the hospital was making me sick." Katie is crying now, red-nosed, carrying a heavy suitcase through the parking lot. "It smells like dying in there," she adds.

Robin pats her younger sister's back and knows there really isn't a right thing to say at a time like this. No magic words to make all of this go away. For Katie or for herself. So she says, "I know."

"I was trying not to cry," Katie says. "I didn't want Mom to see."

"I know," Robin says. "I know."

Robin still knows what it was like when her Aunt Carol moved in after her diagnosis: her pale skin purpled from IVs and needs, her gagging then vomiting into a bucket Robin's mother held in place for her. She wonders if back then, if her mother ever thought _someday, it could be you holding the bucket._ Watching Katie open the car door, Robin wonders. Their eyes meet and Robin is certain they are thinking the same thing. But they both look away without admitting it, leave it that big unspoken thing that pulls them together and pushes them apart. Right now, it's their mother's turn. Their job is to be there, to help her, to be witnesses to this suffering.

When Katie calms down enough to drive, the sisters go straight to the Scherbatsky house, through the deep hallway, up the great winding staircase Robin spent her childhood pretending would someday lead to the Amazon if she kept believing it would. Now, the familiar wooden steps creak beneath her feet and she remembers, for a brief second, what it was like to believe in miracles. As the two sisters near their parents' bedroom, she wishes she still did.

They reach the door but do not cross the threshold. From her place in the hallway, Robin sees her mother lying in bed and just stops. She doesn't know why, but expects something to happen, there in the doorway with the light of the afternoon pouring through the window, highlighting the creases in her mother's forehead, the burgundy quilt covering her body.

For those few long seconds, before she fully enters the room, Robin just looks at her mother asleep. _Like a kid_, she thinks. How small she looks in that big bed surrounded by those extra large pillows and that heavy quilt. How tired she looks, even while asleep.

In the past seven years, she has aged, not noticeably so, but enough to keep Robin grounded. She hasn't stepped into a time warp; this isn't the home and family she left: these are people who, like she has, have grown and changed since she last saw them. It's things as small as the fact that her mother's hair has been cut to chin-length while as long as Robin can remember, her mother wore it in a long mane to the edge of her shoulder blades. She also notices the dark circles under her mother's eyes and the pained expression her face seems to fall to naturally—an image that conflicts with her memory of the woman who raised her.

She notices then, after a minute, her father standing off to the side of the bed with his arms crossed. He looks as he always has, maybe a little grayer and a little older, but just as tall and as threatening as Robin remembers him. She doesn't meet his eyes but watches him nod a greeting at his daughters as if they had gone out for coffee and were just getting back. Robin pays this no attention and instead wonders how long he has been standing there watching her mother sleep.

Katie passes through the doorway first, at Robin's hesitance, to be at their mother's side. Steering her eyes away from her father, Robin follows Katie in on tiptoe. Still, the noise of her footsteps rouses her mother from sleep and her tired eyes flutter open, disoriented.

"Hello," is all the two sisters can say.

Their mother looks at them looming over her from each side of the bed and blinks a few times in recognition. Then she smiles wide at them, a tired smile, Robin notices, a smile that looks a lot like gritting your teeth through the pain, pretending nothing hurts, a smile Robin knows well.

Their mother tries to sit up higher, exhausting herself with the effort, and Robin can hear the sound of her bandage crinkling with each movement she makes forward, the tug of it against her skin, a penalty for every inch she takes.

"How is my little bird?" she asks. She uses the nickname she's had for Robin since she was a little girl, a way of differentiating her from her father.

"I'm fine, Mom," Robin answers quietly as she leans over the bed. Hovers, rather. She doesn't know whether to hug or kiss her mother or just keep her distance, so she hovers there. She hears the bandage she knows is spread across her mother's chest and she hopes it doesn't hurt that much to lean forward like she's doing. If it does, Robin wants her to stop. Then she remembers what Katie said about their mother not wanting to be touched and starts to pull away. But her mother acts first, wrapping her arms around her firstborn like she would an anchor keeping her from floating off up into the unknown.

They hold onto each other for a few minutes like that, like it's everything, until her mother brings her hand up to touch Robin's hair. She strings her fingers through it, like she used to when Robin was still an only child, before she had the capacity to wish certain things had gone differently, when _this_ was all she needed.

Robin feels it, in that moment. She feels the weight of her long hair against her back, the cold leather shoes on her feet, being so much smaller than everyone around her – a child in an adult's world; a child whose mother is holding her, trying to make everything better.

"I missed you," her mother says.

"I missed you too," Robin responds. Then adds, "I should have come back before now."

"Oh, honey," her mother says, reaching for and squeezing her daughter's hand. "You have your own life in New York and your job on TV."

Robin feels herself gravitating toward making some silly comment about how the news keeps coming every day, said with a movement of the wrist and a laugh, but she can't; this is her mother in front of her, tired, sick, bandaged, fighting; and before Robin was anything else, she was a daughter. She is her _daughter_ first.

"I'm so sorry," Robin says to the lines on her mother's forehead, the pain already etched into the curve of her lips, her tired eyes. "I should have…" She can't even count on two hands the amount of times she could have came home before now, the holidays, personal days spent shopping or hung-over or just sitting in the apartment. "I should have come to visit before now," she says again.

Her mother runs her thumb across the top of Robin's hand and answers, "It's okay. You're here now. That's all that matters."

"I'm still sorry—"

"Shh," her mother says, waving her off. "I'm glad you're here. End of discussion." She lets herself rest back on her pillow.

"Tell me, how was your flight?" she asks Robin before turning to Katie and asking, "You found her alright then, eh?"

"It was fine, Mom," Katie answers.

"How are you feeling? Katie said you started chemo this morning?"

"I've been better." Her mother laughs. "I feel okay right now, just sore and tired, like I've been checked by a big defensemen right into the wall." She smiles at her own metaphor and looks over at her husband. Then she says, "At least I still have a few days before I lose all my hair." She takes a moment to herself after this, quietly, as if the chemo were another attack on her body instead of a cure, just an attack on her femininity, as if that were the worst part. _Maybe it is_, Robin thinks, now that the danger has passed, now that she knows she'll beat this as long as her body responds to treatment. Or maybe it's that she remembers her own mother, her own sister, the way they both passed through this first stage hairless as children in the womb.

"You seem a lot better now than you were earlier," Katie says, breaking her silence.

Their mother turns to look at her youngest daughter and says, "I _feel_ a lot better. I'm not nauseous anymore and I think some of the pain killers are finally starting to work."

"That's good new Mom," Robin says.

After a few minutes, her father disappears from his corner and leaves to pick up Aunt Carol from the airport. Robin and Katie are left alone with their mother. For a long time, they just stand around the bed talking to her. For almost an hour, their mother shakes off sleep for them.

They talk about light topics: Robin's job (which she tries to make sound more important than it is), Katie's classes (Psychology, English, the boy who sits behind her in French) but these topics keep getting interrupted with Robin and Katie asking, "Do you want to rest?" and their mother responding, "I'm fine. Now, tell me about Tokyo," or "How is your roommate Ted," to Robin, or "What it's like living in a dorm room," or "What have you been eating in the cafeteria?" to Katie.

But she begins to nod off as Katie tells them about her roommate Lizzie and the nitpicky ways she has to have everything. Their mother twitches back awake a second later and Robin tells her, "Get some rest, Mom."

She looks from one daughter to the other and concedes, "Just a short nap." But as they back away from her bed and towards the door, she moves a little like she wants to follow them. Instead, she speaks again, "If you girls get hungry, there's lunchmeat in the refrigerator and bread in the pantry. And if I sleep too late, there is pasta in the freezer for dinner. There's also some beef stew. And—"

"I know where everything is," Katie interjects.

"We'll be fine. We know how to cook without burning the house down."

"I know that, girls. I just want to make sure you're both settling in okay."

"We're fine," Robin says. "Don't worry about us. Just get some sleep."

Robin turns the lights off and the two sisters leave the room. Their mother, naturally, waves at them. Katie positions the door so that it stays open a crack, in case she needs something. Both sisters peer through the opening and watch their mother close her eyes. Then silently, they go down the stairs.

Robin runs her hand along the familiar banister, a movement so reflex to her, it seems to her she is eighteen again, living here. The same photographs and the same artwork line the walls, and it's only just eerily comforting.

Robin and Katie walk though the dining room with its vaulted ceilings and wooden beams that divide the ceiling into four quadrants. In the kitchen, boxes of cereal, pasta, instant oatmeal, and canned goods line the counter. And when Robin opens the refrigerator, she sees it's stuffed with individual sized yogurts and bags of fruit and three gallons of milk; then she opens the freezer to find enough frozen dinners and chicken strips and homemade pasta meals frozen ahead of time – enough to feed the entire family for months.

"What the hell?" Robin asks. "Is she expecting the blizzard of the century to hit this week or something?"

"You should see the downstairs freezer," Katie says, poking around the counter.

Robin reaches into the freezer and pulls out two frozen loaves of bread to hold up as evidence.

"There's non-frozen bread on the counter. That's for when it runs out."

"Does she think none of us can drive a car to get groceries?" Robin says as she puts the bread back in the freezer.

And Katie explains, "She made Dad take us after the mammogram. She seemed to think Dad would starve if she left him on his own for meals. And she kind of knew already. It's not like the lump would have been a coincidence."

For this, Robin admires her mother. She's a walking, talking handbook on preparation for the worst case scenario.

"But Aunt Carol's going to stay here until—"

"She's already going to be taking care of Mom and driving her to the hospital while Dad's at work. She didn't want this to be any more of a burden."

Robin nods to her sister and takes the ham and cheese out of the lunchmeat drawer, the mustard and mayo off the door, and a half-eaten bag of prepackaged salad that's smashed between two of the gallons of milk. Katie gets two plates and the bread from the counter. Then they sit down at the table and assemble their own sandwiches.

Robin takes a few bites. The bread is too soft and gets stuck in her teeth and on the roof of her mouth. It takes her a while and a lot of maneuvering with her tongue to chew and swallow it. She can't remember the last time she made a sandwich like this. With her work schedule, she usually goes back to sleep at lunch time, missing it entirely.

When the sandwiches are both half-eaten in front of them, Robin asks, "What should we do now?"

"Did you want to bring in your suitcases from the car? We can bring them upstairs if you want to unpack. Mom figured you'd stay in the bedroom that used to be mine, since I kind of moved into yours when you left. Aunt Carol can stay in the guest bedroom."

"That's fine."

As they finish their lunch, Katie tells Robin about their mother's biopsy in more detail. How they waited afterward for the results. The things the doctor told them while their Mom was still under anesthesia.

"There's a chance the cancer won't respond to the treatment and he said if that happens, that's when they'd remove the whole thing. He said it has, and I quote, "worked miracles in early cases like hers." He sounded so sure about the whole thing. Then he started talking about surgical implants and that's where Dad stopped listening I think."

"Do you think she would do it?" Robin asks. "Get an implant, I mean?"

"I think so," Katie says. "She's no Aunt Carol."

They run out to the car without putting their jackets on and Robin asks, "Do you remember when Aunt Carol lived with us?"

"Kind of," Katie answers, lifting the smaller of the bags out of the trunk. Then she adds, "Maybe just from videos."

"You were… twelve years ago… you were eight," Robin says. She closes the trunk after them and follows Katie back into the house.

There has always been this gap between them: ten years, some months, some days, Southern Ontario and Upstate New York, lifestyles, ideologies. Robin was an only child for ten years. Katie maybe is now, in a way. Katie was six when Robin first became Robin Sparkles, nine when Aunt Carol's diagnosis came, twelve when Robin moved out. Robin has to count on her fingers to keep track of it – sometimes, she even imagines Katie as being her own age, how nice it would have been to have someone else.

"How long did she have chemo for?" Katie asks.

"Maybe just a month. I think they did two rounds though. There was some time in between. I don't really remember how much."

They ascend the stairs quietly and dump the suitcases on the floor in Robin's room for the next five days. It isn't long after that the hear their father's truck doors closing outside, followed by Aunt Carol's loud voice. While Robin can't make out the individual words, she knows instinctually that her father would prefer silence.

The sisters run down the stairs on tiptoe to greet their aunt. She's wearing a down vest and turtleneck sweater, as well as a pair of hiking boots. She has a duffel bag strapped across her chest, the band stretching across the flat side of her chest, and she's carrying another large suitcase and a purse in her arms. She drops them all on the kitchen floor when she sees Robin and Katie.

"Girls!" she announces. And when both Robin and Katie each hold up a single finger in front of their lips, she repeats it again, this time in an exaggerated whisper, "Girls!"

Then she comes forward and embraces them both like children. It hasn't gotten any less strange over time hugging a woman with only one breast. It still feels uneven, alien. But Aunt Carol doesn't seem to care or even notice their collective discomfort. In fact, it seems as if she goes out of her way to give them hugs. Two or three times each. She treats her scar and everything that comes with it like a battle wound, something to survive, something that is so ingrained in her that she can't separate herself from it.

"Mom's asleep," Katie whispers to their Dad, who comes in from the car carrying two more suitcases.

He nods and goes upstairs, leaving the three women locked in a five-breasted embrace in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Not five minutes after greeting them, Aunt Carol is already lecturing Robin and Katie, especially Robin, on the necessity of going for regular mammograms. "The earlier they diagnose it, the better," she's saying. "Do you want me to show you how to perform a proper breast exam?"

"No," they both say together, wide-eyed.

"We know how," Robin assures her.

"They show us every year at the—" Katie says.

Without much warning at all, Aunt Carol lifts up her own shirt.

"Oh," Katie finishes.

Aunt Carol does not shy away from displaying the raw, flat skin where her right breast used to be or the normal breast she has left. "We're all girls here," she says to them. Never mind that they are standing in the kitchen with windows that neighbors could see into. Never mind that they're all grown women by now, not young girls. Never mind that Robin and Katie's father went upstairs and could come down at any time. Never mind that they look away after only a few seconds of viewing the flat red skin but its image has already been burned into them. This is just the way Aunt Carol is. Her body, her breasts aren't hers anymore; they're a testament to the path of tribulations she survived in order to stand in front of them, two fingers deftly searching for any sign of lump.

Horrified, Robin and Katie pretend to pay attention while at the same time averting their eyes from their aunt.

"Now you take two fingers and press around it as if your fingers were the hour hand of a clock and you have to press every hour from 12am to 12pm," she goes on, in a whisper. It is the whispering, perhaps, that makes this feel so much more wrong.

"Aunt Carol," Katie whines. She has a hand in front of her eyes. "We already know!"

"You can never be too safe. Maybe if I had done breast exams on myself regularly, I wouldn't have had to have the mastectomy."

The sisters look at each other instead of Aunt Carol. Robin sighs audibly.

"I want you girls to promise me," Aunt Carol says, "that you will do this every day."

"We promise!" Katie says. "Now put your boobs away."

"Every day!" Aunt Carol says in that same loud whisper.

"Every day," Robin repeats.

When Robin's mother wakes up from her nap, the four women spend the evening around her bed. It's a bonding agent, this cancer, something like a noose around all of their necks; though no one says it, they feel its pressure, adjust their breathing, and wiggle around in their seats to be able to bear it.

They watch Humphrey Bogart movies because Robin's mother has always had a thing for the stoic, tough types. She cries at the end of _Casablanca_ and Aunt Carol decides that at 9:00, after such a long day, it's probably time for bed.

Robin and Katie go to their rooms too, though Robin isn't sure why.

She rummages through her suitcase, putting her clothes away in the antique three-drawer dresser across from the bed. When she opens the closet to put away the empty suitcase, she finds all the things she left behind that Katie didn't claim. On the top of the pile, apparently recently added, Robin finds the old diary where she wrote the first draft of _Sandcastles in the Sand_ and a dozen songs she never had the chance to record. On its crisp pages, she also finds the losing-her-virginity story Katie referenced when she came to New York for the first time. She finds a few other records of her own sexual exploits and of parties she went to; _god_, she hopes if Katie read this she at least learned not to do what Robin did, learned that it would not earn their father's attention. She was so young back then. There are also extensive entries written about her father, sometimes cataloging exchanges between then, written with a shaky hand and teary eyes. And a few lists of places Robin wanted to go, things she wanted to do before she got old. She can't help but think that sixteen-year-old Robin would already think she's old.

She picks up her phone, thinking of her friends probably sitting at the bar, she calls Lily.

"Hey honey, I'm going to put you on speaker. Is that okay?"

"Sure," Robin says. She tries to sound animated. As animated as she can given the circumstances. She's still holding the diary in her hands, turning the pages slowly.

"Robin!" she hears them all shout.

"How's Canada?" Ted asks.

"How's your mom?" says a voice she knows as Marshall's.

"It's fine. Everything here's fine. I just sat through a Bogart movie marathon with my mom, aunt and sister."

"Katie's there?" Barney asks. There's a ruckus at the table that sounds like empty beer bottles being shoved aside. "Is she legal yet?'

"Barney!" Lily scolds.

"Ow! Hey!"

"I'm glad I don't have any sisters for Barney to hit on," Marshall says.

"So inconsiderate," Lily says.

"It's okay." There's a pause after Robin speaks where she can hear the normal sounds of the bar in the background: Wendy taking someone's order, a football game on TV in the background, the cling and clatter of glass.

"Well, is she?" Barney asks again.

She stays on the phone with them for a few more minutes. "It's almost like you're here, only not actually here!" Barney interjects at some point.

The four of them start debating who is the greatest actor of all time while Robin just listens to the banter. Ted, of course, agrees with Robin's mother that Humphrey Bogart for his performance in _Casablanca _is the greatest actor of all time. "He has five of the most memorable movie lines ever delivered, four in that movie alone!"

"Always with the classics," Robin mutters.

When Lily suggests Meryl Streep, "for her accent in _Sophie's Choice_" and "general bitchiness in The Devil Wears Prada," Barney claims that having starred in _Mamma Mia_! automatically deducts 1000 points.

"Hey, it wasn't that bad," Marshall says. "And she looks good for her age."

"She's in her sixties. Gross," Barney says.

Then Barney makes a pretty convincing argument for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the _Terminator_ movies. And Marshall starts getting excitedly agitated as begins to make a case for Ian McKellan in Lord of the Rings ("YOU SHALL NOT PASS!") and Sean Connery as "Bond, James Bond."

"What about you, Robin?' Lily asks.

"I don't know. Can't we do best hockey players of all time?"

There is a collective groan. Then a knock at Robin's door. Maybe she's being too loud? She says, "Guys, I have to go. I'll talk to you later. Bye!" and hangs up before they have a chance to protest.

She opens the door and it's Katie standing there holding a bottle of wine by the neck.

So that first night after their parents and Aunt Carol have gone to sleep, Robin and Katie sit in dim light at the big kitchen table with a bottle of Merlot and two glasses.

They speak in whispers, sparingly at first. About Katie in college and the boys she's been dating. Then about Robin: Robin and Ted, Robin and Barney, Robin and Don, Argentina, Tokyo, New York.

When the bottle is halfway gone, they talk about their mother. "I just don't like seeing her weak like this," Katie says and Robin asks, "What's going to happen when we go back in five days?"

At a third of the way gone, they talk about their father, exchange stories and memories and wonder why he is the way he is. They don't come to any earth-shattering conclusions.

When all they have left is an empty bottle, they both stumble off to bed, Katie in Robin's old room, Robin in the guest room with the floral wallpaper, the one that used to be Katie's before Robin moved out and her mother redid it.

She isn't drunk, not really, but all this talking has done something to her, unhinged her a little maybe. It's only eleven, around eleven. So she calls the second-to-last person in her call history: Barney Stinson. She's almost surprised there isn't a girl in his apartment, performing a strip tease or lounging post-coital on his bed.

"I can talk," he says. "What's going on?"

She hears him light a cigarette and wonders if maybe he's already made the girl leave. Maybe there wasn't a girl at all.

Robin reaches for her own box of cigarettes and the lighter that's almost out of fluid that she bought the week before.

"Nothing," she says.

"Why'd you leave so fast earlier?"

"Someone knocked. I thought it might have been my dad telling me I was too loud, but it was just Katie. With wine," she adds.

"You aren't drunk."

"I know."

Somehow, Robin ends up telling him about Aunt Carol and the kitchen breast exam.

All Barney can say in response is, "Hot," at the sight of a Scherbatsky woman touching herself in a kitchen with windows everywhere where any neighbor passing by can see in.

"No," Robin counters, not quite able to explain the gravity of it, the way it struck her as grotesque and well, she doesn't know what else. "It was terrible. She has no shame. It's like… her body is just a body. Like it isn't even hers." She sighs. "Just trust me, it was the opposite of hot."

For a reason she can't quite name, Robin does not mention her aunt's breast cancer or the mastectomy. For a reason she can't quite name, she does not want him to know this about her family, about her, how one day she could be her Aunt Carol, no shame left, surviving her body's atrophy with the dignity of a medical cadaver on display, just a body to prod and study and grimace at.

Barney doesn't really say anything back. She can tell he doesn't understand what she's talking about and doesn't know how to answer. So she asks who won the Great Actor Debate of 2010.

"Ted appended his previous answer and went with Harrison Ford for _Star Wars_. Then we all jumped on it. Except not Lily because she's lame."

"Indiana Jones," Robin says. "I can agree to that."

* * *

Enjoy what you're reading? Leave me a review so I know you're out there and I'm not writing for internet robots.


	7. Part 7

A/N: I know! It's been over a month since I updated, but I've been working on this chapter basically the whole time. It is actually about 10 pages longer, because I wanted her to leave Canada at the end of it, but I'm not finished with that part yet, so, think of this is Chapter 7 Part 1. Kind of. I *should* have the next part up by the end of this week because I'm so close! Thanks to everyone who's still reading! And Happy Valentines/Desperation Day!

Also, if the ads on FFNet bug you like they bug me, if you'd rather read it there, I post this story on the barneyrobin livejournal community. Here's a link to part 7 over there: .

As always, please enjoy and review!

VII

The next morning wakes Robin early; so early there's still moonlight shining though the curtains, casting strange and unnatural shadows along the walls. She lays buried under a heap of blankets, unconsciously hiding herself from the drafty window like she used to when she was small. The cold here has a wildness to it that doesn't exist in New York City, a way of seeping in though the storm windows and hundred-year old walls she's no longer used to. The morning noises, too, are different here: just the distant scurry of small animals outside, the rattling of branches. No cars, no buses or trains calling out under the night sky.

Still wrapped in the warm wonder of dreaming she is somewhere she isn't, Robin notices none of this outright. She is waking gradually from a dream she doesn't yet know is a dream (the hands touching her only phantom hands, the laughter only a representation of her subconscious.) Yet, as the last trails of sleep flit away, the feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar doesn't leave her. Without even opening her eyes, she knows she isn't in her room in New York City.

It's the sheets - probably made with some kind of satin or Egyptian cotton, probably expensive – that throw her, coupled the fact that she remembers, almost to the point that she still feels, Barney's voice rumble in her ear late into the night, coaxing her tired body to sleep. Tentatively, without opening her eyes, she reaches her hand across the bed, extends her fingertips until she reaches the edge. When she doesn't feel anyone, she opens her eyes and sits up.

She's alone.

The antique clock on the nightstand reads 4:30am. The curtains are a hideous floral print, there's snoring coming from a room down the hall, and the dresser has no unfolded clothes arching their traitorous limbs out of its drawers. This isn't her room. Then she sees her suitcases on the floor, their contents overflowing, her airplane boarding pass on the nightstand, and her phone in bed with her on the other pillow.

And where she is and why come back to her. Of course she's alone.

She remembers then it was the phone that pressed warm against her ear the night before, the hum of his sleep voice broken down to sound waves that traveled across hills and cities and skies to reach her.

Not for the first time in her life, Robin feels homesick. And it's still too early for her to do something stupid like call him again, or call any of them. So instead, she lets herself sink back into the covers and pulls them up to her neck. She stares at the ceiling wide-eyed for a few minutes, waiting for sleep to come again, maybe for her to fall back into dreaming of him, before she thinks about the implications of wanting to. She isn't surprised when sleep doesn't come.

What Robin needs is to get out of the house. What she needs is a cigarette.

So she takes the pack out of her purse and tiptoes down the stairs.

Barefoot, the kitchen tile makes her realize consciously for the first time how far away she is from New York City, how cold it is here. Then through the kitchen windows, she sees the backyard covered by a thin layer of untouched snow. It doesn't, though perhaps it should, deter her.

Robin goes to the hall closet, shrugs into her jacket, slips her bare feet into her mother's winter boots. She opens the back door slowly, knowing it has always creaked. Stepping out onto the porch, the snowflakes crunch beneath her feet. She stands there with cold hands, no gloves, fumbling with the lighter and box of cigarettes. She nearly spills them all onto the grass.

"Shit," she says as she catches them. She sticks one between her lips and jams the rest back into her coat pocket with the crumpled box to deal with later.

Once it's lit, ducks her hands into her pockets because the wind chill is getting to her already. Still, the stiff Ontario air is what she needs on a morning like this. They all have to be at the hospital by 8:30 to meet with the oncologist. Robin needs the cold to wake her into the reality of all this, to snap her out of that dream she doesn't want to think about.

She steps off the back porch, switches which hand she's using for her cigarette every few steps to warm it in her pocket. She pulls the fur hood up over her head. Then she starts to walk. She spends her first morning in Ontario trudging through snow; not the powder-soft kind that you can kick up, but the kind hardened over by frozen rain that cracks and breaks apart as you push through it and sucks you in like quick sand. She walks through their neighborhood, walks to an empty park she played at maybe twenty years ago, completely different now with new swings and a jungle gym. She doesn't stop to reminisce, just keeps walking, lights another cigarette.

She can't help but concentrate on the fact that now, nothing in her life is going to be the same. Even if the treatment works—even after, she corrects herself—Even after the treatment, Robin will always have that nagging worry that the cancer will come back, maybe appear somewhere else. Her parents' mortality is something she will never think of in the same light again. People don't just keep living forever. She keeps reminding herself.

It's still the kind of early where Robin can't see another person and it feels like she's alone in the world. To the west, her family's house. To the east, the sun's lazy half-light rising over the first snow. There's something about being alone at the edge of a clearing, something about perspective. How there's so much else out there. Or something. She can't completely grasp the way it starts to revive her.

Standing there in the snow, rubbing her hands together, Robin makes herself a thousand promises to visit more often, call more often, be a better daughter, be the kind of person her mother would want her to be.

She's almost numb from the cold, but she only notices when the wind blows against her face, when the wet snow makes its way into her boots. By the time her second cigarette is all but burnt to the quick, it's time to head back. She traces her own footprints, not wanting to mar the glitter sheen of the still untouched snow around her.

She goes in through the kitchen door, leaves the wet boots and jacket in the closet. Then she makes her way through the house, quietly, pausing at the top of the stairs because she's heard a sound. She turns to look, thinking Katie might have heard her get up, or worse, her father. The last thing she needs at 5 in the morning is a lecture on smoking.

But it's neither of them.

It's her mother. Standing in the hallway, bracing herself against the wall with one arm, hunched over, crying.

Robin rushes over to her. In a second, everything about the phone call and the dream and the calm of the night turned morning are gone from her.

"I fainted," her mother says. "Third time since yesterday."

She laces her arm around her mother's back, supporting her until she calms down.

"I was getting a drink of water," her mother manages. In a whisper. And it's unclear whether she's trying to be quiet or if she doesn't have the air left after crying to make her any voice louder.

"You could have called my cell. I would have gotten it," Robin says.

"No," is her mother's response. "I didn't want to wake you."

"I was up already. I usually wake up before 4 to get ready for work. I couldn't sleep later than that."

Her mother doesn't say anything in response, only allows Robin to lead her back to the bedroom and put her in the bed. Her father, on his opposite side of the bed, turns over and mumbles, "What's going on?" and "Are you okay?" to Robin's mother.

Her mother is overcome, Robin thinks with the decreased mobility the doctor must have warned her about. Maybe she didn't take him seriously enough.

In her mother's silence, Robin answers, "She's fine. I'm going to get her a drink of water. Go back to sleep."

Robin doesn't like to see all this has already taken away from her mother: the right not to be a prisoner in her own bed. And she wonders what will happen when she goes back to New York and Katie back to college. If her father and Aunt Carol with manage. How they will manage.

Finally, around 5:40am, Robin crawls back into her own bed, the sheet and blanked pushed back and cold, to sleep for two more hours, to wait for the day to really begin.

Later that morning after their father leaves for work, Robin and Katie go with their mother and Aunt Carol to the hospital to meet with the oncologist. Robin's mother is waiting for her chemotherapy injection and to talk to the doctor about the fainting, at Aunt Carol's insistence.

"It's probably nothing serious," Aunt Carol said at breakfast. "But we shouldn't take any chances."

Robin's father works during the day, so it is just the women sitting in the waiting room, paging through magazines without really reading them; Robin's mother doesn't even put up a calm façade. Instead, she leans her head back against the wall, eyes closed, dreading, Robin knows by the expression on her face. The other three sneak glances at her from behind the magazines they aren't reading.

It is almost 9:00 in the morning and they are still waiting, even though the appointment was set for 8:30, even though Robin's mother is sitting with them there in a wheeled chair with her eyes closed, wishing she were home already. Robin can see it in her face though she wishes she couldn't.

She tries to stop watching her mother. She reads an article about the life of fishermen then looks at some advertisements for boats, which remind her of Becky and makes her put the magazine down. She regrets not bringing something to do while they wait. She scrolls through her cell phone contacts, not planning to call or message anyone, just for something to look at.

Inside the hospital, it's a different world. Uncomfortable chairs with Kleenex boxes scattered around for the families of the people who don't make it out. The sterility of it gets to Robin, somewhere deep down. The garbled voices on the intercom. The incomprehensible language of doctors. The way all the nurses smile as they pass by the waiting room as if those smiles could make up for what everyone's going through. Birth, sickness, and death mean something different inside these walls than outside them; something like a science to be studied, evaluated, hypothesized; something cold and sterile and accepted and all-encompassing; something in the air.

Robin gets up to fill a Dixie cup with water from a dispenser in the corner. She brings one for her mother without her asking.

Not long after, a nurse comes to take Robin's mother to her appointment and the three of them sit, waiting again. When Aunt Carol exhausts the hospital's supply of available reading material, she begins to list for Robin and Katie the side effects of chemotherapy and what they can expect from their mother. She has this talk down to a science, having helped out with support groups after winning her first battle against breast cancer.

Aunt Carol explains, "The hair begins to fall out about a week after starting chemotherapy. For some, it's worse than the nausea – a physical representation of how they've been feeling. I kept it together pretty well until my hair started coming out."

Robin, of course, remembers. She can visualize it: the chunks of dark hair on her aunt's pillow, on the soft-bristled hairbrush she used those first two weeks, the plastic basin her mother used to rinse her hair, how they used to hide the long strands that came out – shove them into their pockets, push them under the bed or pillow – when her aunt was around. How Aunt Carol used to cry, asking for a mirror that Robin's mother wouldn't give her. Then she remembers the colorful headscarves her mother started to buy from mail-order catalogues, how her mother would tie them around her aunt's head and say, "Now you're making a fashion statement," and how this would cheer her up, get her smiling again.

God, her mother is going to go though the same thing.

And Robin isn't going to be in the room this time, collecting the strands of her mother's fallen hair to hide or braid together. She's going to be back in New York, back home at the bar laughing at the latest incident in Lily's kindergarten class, or whatever pick-up-line Barney's planning to use that night, or Ted and Marshall's criticism of said pick-up-line. She's going to be moving on with her life.

_Damnit_, she thinks.

Aunt Carol manages to cover "diminished immune system" and "nausea and vomiting" on her list of side effects and how they affected her before the oncologist finally shows up.

He's young, mid thirties, about as young as doctors come. Dark hair, strong cheekbones. If he weren't her mother's oncologist and it were a few weeks ago, Robin might have had a thing for him.

"Scherbatsky?" he calls out, reading from his clipboard.

The three of them stand up as he approaches. He slides his pencil behind his ear and extends his hand to them. He seems to recognize Katie.

"Nice to meet you," Aunt Carol says and shakes his hand.

Katie responds with a familiar, "Hello," while Robin echoes her aunt.

He motions for them all to sit down. Then he pulls up a waiting room chair and sits across from them, casually, the way a friend might. The way Barney always does when he's the last to arrive at McLaren's. Then he introduces himself as Dr. Taylor.

"She's doing fine," Dr. Taylor begins, looking at each of them in turn. "Good news first?" he asks. "Not that the bad news is _bad__news._"

"Good news first," Aunt Carol says. By her demeanor, Robin can tell she is neither surprised at the mention of bad news nor worried about it. "So it takes the sting out of the bad."

Robin isn't sure if she agrees with her aunt's logic. She would have asked for the bad news first, maybe under the illusion that it would be replaced with the good minutes later. But she doesn't say anything. Aunt Carol is in charge here. Robin and Katie sit in her shadow.

"It'll be a few more days before we can remove the stitches, but she's healing nicely from the biopsy. It probably won't even leave a scar." The doctor stops right there as if he's forgotten about the bad news.

"And the bad news?" Katie asks. She's folding and unfolding the cover of last month's E magazine as it rests on her lap. A nervous tic she didn't know her sister had.

The doctor pulls out his clipboard, flips a few pages back and says, "She mentioned a minor fainting spell early this morning and two yesterday. At this point, dizziness, even fainting and weakness, are common while the body is adjusting to the treatment. But, it's always better to err on the side of caution."

Aunt Carol nods like she knows what the doctor is going to say before he says it, as if being a cancer survivor and survivor enthusiast makes her somehow telepathic, omniscient in situations like these. How earnest she is almost makes Robin feel guilty for resenting it.

The doctor continues, "So we ran a quick blood test. It's nothing too serious, but she seems to be developing an iron deficiency. We'll know for sure when the results come back, but I'm fairly certain it's anemia."

Aunt Carol nods her head again, still apparently unfazed, while a look of terror flashes across Katie's face. No doubt, she's probably running through Aunt Carol's list of complications and side effects, trying to remember exactly what anemia caused and was caused by. Robin isn't sure what kind of expression lines her own face; she is numb, self-aware, distant.

But something tells Robin to reach out for her sister's hand - to try and calm her. When Katie squeezes her hand back too hard, Robin wonders if it didn't have the opposite effect. She's never been the comforting type and Katie knows it.

The doctor looks Robin in the eye and continues, "This is not an uncommon response to the chemotherapy drug we've put her on. With chemotherapy drugs, there are always side effects. You have to pick and choose which ones you are prepared to risk."

"She had anemia when she was pregnant with you," Aunt Carol says to Katie. "It's not the worst side effect. Completely manageable."

"Okay," Katie says slowly, unconvinced.

"Very manageable," Dr. Taylor affirms. "Just a simple supplement pill with breakfast and that'll be the end of it."

Afterwards, after her mother is done vomiting, after the nurse smiles at them too broadly on their way out, after Aunt Carols grasps the handles of the wheelchair and pushes her own sister, pale-faced and shaky, out of the hospital, after Robin helps lift her mother into the car, they ride home in a tense silence. Her mother has a headache and feels nauseous; she doesn't want to be touched or jostled, and every time the car turns a corner or comes to a stop at a red light, she lets loose a small groan. It is this kind of half silence, Robin thinks, that left Katie in tears at the airport.

For the twenty minutes they spend on the way home, Robin and Katie, the witnesses, try their hardest to become invisible. Maybe Robin imagines it, but sitting there in the passenger seat, breathing quietly the same air as her mother, suffering, and her aunt, who has come away from her own suffering, Robin feels out of place. She imagines one of those big moments people write novels about, imagines it happening between her mother and aunt, a conclusion reached, an understanding gained, in which, in another world where Robin and Katie don't exist, both women turn to each other at the same moment and say, "This must have been what it was like for you."

Vaguely, Robin knows the roads that lead home; she counts them as they pass, eyes never leaving the window, and releases a audible breath when finally, at the end of the journey, Aunt Carol pulls into their shrub-lined driveway.

But when they get there, the house, too, becomes silent: her mother spends hours asleep with the blinds closed, Aunt Carol catches up on work only taking breaks to check on her sister, Katie starts a research paper due on Monday. Robin is the only one without something to keep her busy.

So she goes outside and down the block to smoke. Again, she wears her mother's boots and a jacket that doesn't belong to her. Maybe because of the boots, she thinks about the phrase, walk a mile in someone's shoes. She doesn't just think about it. She keeps thinking about it. Her, walking in her mother's shoes.

Around 11:30, she finds herself in her room alone. It should be relaxing. But nothing about it brings her any sort of calm. She wants to fade back into the cold morning, into the air warmed by her own breath underneath the blankets.

Instead, she spends an hour or two sorting through the miscellanea left behind seven years ago when she first moved out. Haphazardly, she makes piles: things she doesn't want to lose forever, but that she doesn't need in New York; objects her mother might want to save for whatever reason; pieces of her childhood that she will bring back home and share with her friends; things to donate, things to trash; things to save but keep hidden.

Robin tries her best to remain objective as she divides diaries, old Polaroid pictures of her and her high school friends, clothes she would never dream of wearing again, bottle caps, high school and college diplomas, jewelry that used to be her grandmother's, ticket stubs from concerts and movies, letters from old boyfriends and American pen-pals, old birthday cards, and yearbooks between the piles.

She has never put much stock in nostalgia. It was surprisingly easy for her, just out of college, ambitious, to leave it behind with her worn ice skates and shrunken Scherbatsky hockey jersey. She was an eyes-on-the-prize kind of girl. So it's hard now, looking at her youth in piles on the floor. Part of her wants to gather it all up in her arms and throw it in the nearest dumpster. _Why save any of it_? she thinks. And what does it matter that she finds a picture of herself at fourteen and can't remember it, can't remember what she used to be like. But does it matter who she was then? Or who she is now?

She doesn't know.

By now it's noon and she still isn't hungry. There's something about witnessing someone throw up that sucks the desire to eat right out of her, even though it was hours ago. For lack of anything better to do, Robin steps outside the quiet house again to have a cigarette. She makes at least three excuses for why she deserves a cigarette right now in the time it takes to reach the door.

And while she's out there, she calls Barney despite telling herself not to. Something about how while dreaming of him in moments of weakness might be what she needs right now, the real Barney is something else entirely. It isn't fair to either of them, she thinks in a brief moment of clarity, for her to need him to be someone he isn't. But she ignores it.

It's the same with smoking. She's been quitting ever since she started and hasn't followed through once for more than a week at a time. And why bother quitting if it makes her feel better? There's something about Barney. She can't quite explain it. Just that in the airport he seemed like he knew how to help her. He told her to call, she tells herself.

The phone rings maybe three times and even though it's the middle of the day and he's at work, she hears, "Go for Barney," on the other end.

It surprises her to hear his voice, as if she wasn't sure she was really calling him at all. She feels so far away, like someone from a different world. She doesn't say anything at first. But he probably hears her breathing as she decides what not to say.

"Scherbatsky?" he calls. She makes a slight noise in response. "Good timing! Conference call! I'll put you on speaker."

"Okay," she says, even though she isn't in the mood. But really, what is she supposed to say? _I need to talk to you because I am walking in my mother's boots and my room is full of old pieces of my childhood that I don't know what to do with?_ It doesn't even make sense. Besides, she has the feeling he would tell her to toss everything, which is the opposite of what she wants him to say. So by her judgment, it's probably better this way.

"Robin!" Marshall shouts.

"Hey Robin, how's it going?" Ted asks.

"Hey guys," she answers. She balances the phone on her shoulder and lights another cigarette. "It's going fine."

"How's your mom?" Ted asks.

Robin sighs. "Sick?" she ventures. "We went to the hospital for her chemo injection today. The doctor said it feels worse than the cancer. But I guess that means it's working."

"I hope she feels better," Marshall says.

"Me too. Though it means she'll probably subject me and Katie to her Humphrey Bogart fanaticism."

"Hey, he made some great movies," Ted counters.

"By playing exactly the same character over and over again." This time is it Barney. "How can you be the greatest actor of all time without any range?"

"But he did a damn good job as that hardened hero with a secret, tragic past," says Ted.

"I don't know what it is with her and those strong, introverted, stoic types. It's the same thing with my dad. It's her type."

"Daddy issues... Hot."

"Have we ever seen a picture of your mom?" Marshall asks.

"I don't know."

"I know I haven't. Your dad either," Ted says.

"I'll bring one."

She listens as one of them crushes up a beer can. She would bet Marshall for the satisfied noise he makes as he's crushing it. "Graaaah," he roars.

"Well you aren't missing anything," Ted says, then takes a drink. She can hear him swallow it. "Everyone except me has been pulling 12 hour workdays. What time did you get home last night, Marshall? 3?"

"3:08."

"I was here all night," Barney says. "Helping that new intern set up her log-ins." Someone, probably Barney, swallows. "Laying the groundwork for her forward mobility within the company."

"Is this some fancy way of saying you slept with Marcy?" Marshall asks.

"Marcy? Who's Marcy?"

"The new intern."

"Oh, that's her name?" his voice echoes. "Well she didn't mind being called Michelle all night long. What up?"

Ted, she assumes, is the one who finally high-fives him. Since Marshall still seems distraught about it having been Marcy, whoever she is. Robin imagines her as eighteen with an amazing rack, probably blond and ditzy, probably irritating.

"But Marcy's smart," Marshall says. "And she showed me a picture of her and her boyfriend in Hawaii from their last spring break."

"No lady can resist the Barnacle."

"I don't believe you," Marshall's voice comes again. "Marcy has morals."

"Pft."

"Marcy is not one of your bimbos. You did not sleep with her."

"Okay, okay, I didn't sleep with her." But Robin can _hear_ the wink in his voice.

"You dirty, lying man-boy," Marshall accuses.

"Well maybe it wasn't Marcy," Ted says. "Aren't there a slew of interns around here?"

"Not _new_ interns."

"Okay, fine, I didn't sleep with her. I just had her investigate some files for me." Again, she hears the wink. But they all let it go, knowing probably that Barney could go on lying about fake conquests for hours.

"So, Robin," Ted interrupts, "What are you up to?"

It's her chance, she knows—to talk about it if she needs to. And it probably won't come around again, at least in this phone conversation. But even though she's on the edge of this feeling, this fear, she can't vocalize it. Not like this while they're drinking beer on the roof of GNB, joking about Barney and his bimbos.

So she says, "Just cleaning out some old stuff and hanging around."

"By, old stuff, I hope you mean your Robin Sparkles attire," Barney says. "If you find anything you wore on Space Teens or 'Let's Go to the Mall' I will pay you $500 for it."

"Seriously?" Ted says.

"$1000, but that is my final offer."

"Barney!" Marshall says.

Robin says the only thing she can. "I'll look."

As much as they'd like to stay on the conference call all day, Marshall says they have to get back to work. He has a 50 page legal document to read through and Barney has a 1:00 meeting with some Japanese CEO. Ted is done for the day, going home to prepare for his class and work on the drawings for the new GNB headquarters. And Robin, Robin is left to roam around in snowy neighborhood silence.

An hour later, she is out of cigarettes.

So she borrows her mom's car and pays with American dollars. When she gets home, around three in the afternoon, she calls Lily.

"How are you, honey? Are you doing okay? How's your mom?" Lily asks her. In the background, pots and pans and spoons clank together. Cabinets open and close, the tap runs.

"I'm fine," Robin answers too quickly, like she always does, automatically. "My mom's doing okay. She's sleeping."

There's a pause where Robin decides whether or not to tell her about the anemia, where Robin wonders how much Lily wants to know. It's almost as if Lily detects it, her reluctance.

"There's something else," Lily says.

Robin, on her end of the phone, back in Canada, takes a deep breath. "The doctor said something about an iron deficiency. A side effect of the chemo."

"Are you worried?" Lily asks and the sound of kitchen noises cease. "You sound worried."

"The way he described it sounded like it wasn't a big deal. But this whole thing is..."

"I'm know, sweetie. I wish we could be there for you."

"Thanks, Lily." She allows her friend's voice to calm her, wanting at the same time to tell Lily just hearing her voice helps so much. But she doesn't. She can't even figure out how to word it; it isn't her. So she says, "Thank you," again, with more finality.

As she wonders back to her qualms with honesty, a timer goes off on Lily's end.

"Oh!" Lily says.

The kitchen sounds continue. But it's too early for dinner, so she asks, "What are you making?"

"Cherry pie," Lily answers. "Marshall's been really busy this week with work, staying until 9 or 10 every day; but yesterday he got home at 3am! Can you believe it? So today he promised he'd get out on time. If he keeps his promise, he'll get to eat this pie. If he doesn't, I'll bring it over to Ted's and Marshall can just hear about how amazing it was tomorrow during one of their _conference calls_."

Robin laughs, then tells her about the conference call from earlier. And the weight of it all, the anxiety, lessens its grip on her.

The next few days blend together. The hospital, the house that seems so empty with everyone confined to their individual spaces, the snow that starts to melt into big dirty puddles; it all moves slowly. In the afternoons, Robin has taken to sitting in her mother's room reading the newspaper cover to cover, even the classifieds, keeping an eye on her mother over the paper. She turns the pages quietly, but her mother was always one of those mothers who could nap in front of the TV during hockey games or as Katie and Robin fought over the last yogurt downstairs, even when it escalated to a shouting match. She could sleep through alarm clocks, incorporate their noises into her dreams. Robin is the same way.

Some days, before her father comes home, while her mother is resting and her aunt and sister are working, Robin goes to the basement and marvels at the gun collection. She holds them in her hands -safety on- and aims at something far off.

On the third day, she hears another set of footsteps coming down the stairs, stepping into the musky smell of cigars smoked days, months, years ago.

"Some collection he has," her aunt says when she reaches the last stair.

"Yeah."

She watches her aunt cross the room in five large steps so that she is at Robin's side. Aunt Carol reaches forward and picks up a rifle from its designated cabinet; she angles it on her shoulder, runs her fingers over the barrel, looks through the scope. Robin knows that seven years ago, that rifle used to be her father's favorite. She wonders if it still is.

Aunt Carol holds it carefully and says, "It's been a long time."

Because she's wearing a pair of pink slipper boots over her jeans, has her hair pulled back into a bun and her reading glasses on, it's hard to see her standing in the middle of the frozen woods with a loaded rifle in her arms, holding it steady through the recoil. It's like her aunt is really two people – before and after cancer. And what's worse, is her aunt knows it and allows it.

It occurs to Robin that cancer for her aunt is the armor she hides behind, the valley where her right breast used to be, the cloud of fear that haunts her and never lets anyone get too close.

"This one's a beauty," her aunt says, setting it back on the display. "The last time I went hunting was 2009. I miss it."

But Robin isn't sure if she believes her.

"I haven't been hunting since I moved to New York," she offers.

In fact, the last time she went hunting was with Jessica Glitter. She still remembers it: the trip way up north, trailing a few caribou for nearly a day. By the time they got close enough to get a good shot, the muscles in Robin's calves had all but given out. But she was younger then. All she had to do was tell herself to keep going and she was able to. Between her and Jessica of them, they just had enough energy left afterwards to drag the carcass to the van. She guesses, to a certain extent, she misses it. But she lives a different life now. She's a New Yorker.

"In New York, I just go to the shooting range," she says.

"It's hunting season now," Aunt Carol notes. "But neither of us qualifies as resident anymore. I think we'd have to go with an outfitter now. And register in the summer, maybe."

And Robin can see on her face that she is wondering if she could still do it – the long days, the nights camped out in untamed land. She sees the doubt there.

"I know," she says. She puts her father's gun back in place. "It's alright."


	8. Part 8

Author's Notes: I'm thinking this is going to be ten parts total, as I'm getting closer to the end of it. As always, reviews are appreciated. They let me know I'm not spending hours writing fanfiction just for myself. So, if you're out there, let me know what you think.

And for those few faithful reviewers who comment after (almost) every chapter, thank you so much. It's you guys I'm writing this story for. I hope you enjoy this chapter and the Barney/Robin moment near the end of it!

VIII

Strangely enough, just as Robin starts to feel comfortable with her family, it is already her last day in Toronto. No one mentions it all morning. Even Robin leaves her suitcases unpacked, her dirty clothes in piles on the floor where she was standing when she took them off. If not for the floral wallpaper and antique furniture, the room wouldn't look that much different from her room in New York. It feels close enough like home.

She has even found herself able to ignore her father's disparaging comments without trying immediately to placate him. Practice, she tells herself. And she's been able to control her anxiety when her mother's voice takes on that awareness of her own mortality – when she says things like, "If something were to happen, you know I love you, don't you?" And to not resent her aunt for the way she's refined her life to make sickness some kind of god ruling over her. And to bond with Katie in the way she would have had she not left her family and moved to New York.

So on Robin's last day in Toronto, as they're all pilling into the minivan for her mother's appointment, it feels like some bizarre family vacation: her father behind the wheel, her aunt riding shotgun, her mother sitting in between her and Katie in the middle section. The last family vacation they took was to Montreal when Robin was thirteen, before her aunt got sick and moved in, before she quit hockey to become a pop star, back when they were all close like she imagines most families should be. During that calm that fades after childhood ends, before you start to see the world as it really is. It's like she's spent four days now floating in that calm, waiting for the inevitable moment where it shatters to pieces, to reality.

In the hospital waiting room, Robin cracks her knuckles. She's been craving a cigarette all morning because she slept in late and couldn't find any time to sneak away from the house to smoke. Her eyes are focused, a little too intently, on the second hand of the analog clock on the opposite wall.

Beside her, Katie chews her nails – or what's left of them – as she works on homework. She has two days to finish a psychology research paper that Robin's heard her discuss with her aunt and mother more times than she can care to remember.

Aunt Carol reads a science journal, keeping herself up to date on the latest treatments and studies, underlines talking points with a ball-point pen.

Robin's father sits up straight, stares across the room at a television showing highlights from last night's Canucks game.

Robin's mother, out of nervousness, talks. She goes on about the house and the kitchen and the weather and what they can eat for lunch and dinner. She taps her foot against the stopper of the wheelchair she doesn't really need now but will need after.

She asks Katie, "How's your research paper?"

And Katie, armed with a yellow highlighter and a psychology textbook open on her lap, looks at her mother. "I finished most of the research. I'm going to start writing it this afternoon," she answers dutifully. But her eyes linger on her mother's as she maybe contemplates the psychology of it all. She opens her mouth again and says, "It's okay, Mom. Calm down."

Her mother just nods.

And something in that nod makes Robin admire her younger sister more than she ever has before, but simultaneously makes her feel like a spectator on a family dynamic that doesn't include her. She cracks her left wrist, then her right.

A few minutes later, a nurse with a clipboard comes to collect her mother. And Aunt Carol, not Robin's father, pushes the wheelchair down the hall. Robin watches their receding forms until they disappear around the corner.

Robin is left sitting between her sister and her father in the waiting room. The silence between the three of them, amid the conversations of nurses and the low hum of the television, is worse somehow than the sound of her Aunt Carol's voice enumerating symptoms of chemotherapy. Robin sits up straight, inclining her head the slightest bit in order to read a few sentences from Katie's textbook. She doesn't speak or breathe too loudly. She has learned, since childhood, not to invite her father's criticism.

But after the television station switches back to news, he leans forward anyway, unprovoked, and says, "RJ, how is your journalism coming along?"

She tenses up. Of course she tenses up. This might be the first time he's addressed her with a question that couldn't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" since she arrived four days ago, practically since she left seven years ago. She's at a loss for words. There's no way she can possibly make her job sound purposeful enough for him, so she doesn't really try.

She says, "It's fine."

An unfamiliar nurse passes by the waiting room and smiles in at them. Robin follows the path she makes with her eyes.

"You aren't still at that Metro channel, are you?"

"No," she says simply, softly. "I co-host a morning news show. And I'm still applying for jobs as a foreign correspondent."

"A foreign correspondent?" he repeats. "With your luck they'll send you to Afghanistan and get you killed." He laughs.

Robin just laughs too, turned into that little girl again where any interest her father has in her means something. She even smiles, just because it's the closest he's come to caring for her well-being in years – his not wanting her dead.

Robin does not look at her sister and can practically feel her rolling her eyes. But Katie has never felt that same desire to try and please their father; Robin can see now that in a way, Katie's refusal has earned her a certain amount of respect. But it's too late for Robin to go back and do it all again differently. And she cares what he thinks of her, even if she knows better.

Not long after her father has stopped chuckling at his own joke, Aunt Carol and Dr. Taylor approach the three of them in the waiting room.

"Nice to see you all again." The doctor greets them cheerily and systematically shakes each of their hands. "Your mother is just waiting for the nausea to pass. Otherwise, she's doing very well," he tells them.

Then he sits down. He gestures for them to do the same. And Robin gets her first suspicion that something's up. You only sit people down for bad news. During the moment he pauses for breath, hundreds of complications are running through her head; the most prominent ranging from: the cancer has moved to some other part in her body, the mutated cells aren't responding to the treatment, they're going to have to amputate both her mother's breasts, all the way to Aunt Carol having detected another lump in her own remaining breast. Robin takes a deep breath herself. And Katie looks just as nervous as she does.

"I did have something else I wanted to discuss with you all."

Robin's stomach has leapt up to the top of her rib cage as she waits for him to open his mouth again. The doctor takes a long glance at Robin and Katie.

Then Aunt Carol takes command of the situation. "We were talking about getting some genetic testing done," she says.

And Robin lets out a sigh of relief. But even her relief is short-lived.

The doctor continues, "I don't want to scare you, but the risk of developing breast cancer is generally higher if you've had two or more relatives with breast or ovarian cancer, especially if it developed before their forties."

Aunt Carol interrupts again. "There's a possibility that we have a mutated gene that causes breast cancer."

"A possibility," Dr. Taylor says. He doesn't just say it; he enunciates it the way Ted does when he's correcting someone. "The BRCA1 or BCRA2 mutation is transmitted from parent to child and has been linked to breast cancer."

Robin wants to say something. Instead she meets her sister's eyes. She doesn't sneak a glance at her father who is probably standing off to the side with his arms crossed. It isn't like she hasn't thought about it, about this cancer somehow being tied to their genes. But it's one thing thinking about potentially being doomed when she's drunk or in a low spot and an entirely different thing when there's a man in scrubs standing in front of her with a clipboard confirming those suspicions.

He continues, "What we could do is run a genetic test to determine whether or not you carry the mutation. If we find out that the mutation is in your genetic code, your risk factor jumps to 60%. There are then preventative measures we could take – mammograms, regular screenings, changes in diet and lifestyle. In some cases, we have performed a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy to remove the risk completely."

A mastectomy like her aunt's? Robin isn't even thirty yet; she has countries to visit and goals to accomplish still. This isn't how her life is going to happening, she knows that much. There is no way she is getting a mastectomy, especially a preventative mastectomy. There is no way that this is going to become her life like it has her aunt's.

"Great," she says sarcastically before she has the chance to think better of it. She's on edge due to stress and a lack of nicotine. "That's great." Her hand moves automatically to her purse, where her stash of cigarettes are hidden, but she stops herself.

"It's just something to think about," the doctor says. "No pressure to decide right now."

"We'll definitely consider it," Aunt Carol says. The way she says it sounds a lot to Robin like she has already made her mind up for all of them.

Robin's voice has left her mouth before she has time to consider her words. "I'm not interested," she says, though it comes out a whisper. She is aware to some extent that her hands are shaking slightly, so she curls them into fists. She just doesn't want to see her life with a roadblock or a dead end preventing her from getting to where she wants to be. She imagines the shadow of a hangman. It's standing over all of them in the waiting room. She just needs to get out.

Katie takes a deep breath that looks like she's putting off nausea, then says, "I don't know. Does Mom want us to?"

"She thinks it would be a good idea," Aunt Carol answers in a soft, rehearsed voice, as if she were a veteran in situations like these. She probably is. Then she rests her hand on Robin's shoulder and rubs it a little; and it all feels to Robin so staged. "Why not?" her aunt asks. "Wouldn't it be good to know? Increase your chance of beating it if you have it. Let you stop worrying if you don't."

"Well, a risk would still be there regardless of the presence of the gene," the doctor explains. "But it with the mutation, the likelihood of it becoming cancerous down the lines increases."

Their voices carry on around her and Robin is glad she's already sitting. The way this news suffocates her makes it seem there's no way out. What she wants is to be back in New York. What she wants is for this past week to have never happened. For her to still be upset that Barney wouldn't talk to her or that she's working a job she hates or that she's still alone and completely unequipped to just be honest with anyone. For that to be the biggest of her worries.

"I don't want that hanging over me for the rest of my life," Robin says, still in a whisper.

But it doesn't have the power behind it she imagines it would because Katie responds almost immediately. "Isn't it already?" she asks.

And Robin's breath catches in her throat because Katie's right.

The doctor doesn't answer, only looks down at his clipboard. Robin's father still stands mute somewhere to her left.

"Thank you," Aunt Carol says to the doctor.

"It's something to consider. If you change your mind or decide on anything, we can set those tests up." He hands Aunt Carol a pamphlet. "Just think about it."

"Thank you," she responds again. "We will."

"Mrs. Scherbatsky is in room 311B when you want to go see her. She's cleared to leave as soon as she's ready. Some people like to take a little bit of time after chemo."

Robin wipes her eyes and stands up. She doesn't head to her mother's room, but to the front door.

"Thank you again," she hears Aunt Carol say, distant.

Robin's turned the corner before the doctor has time to respond.

That afternoon, Robin washes her mother's hair in the bathroom sink. Neither woman has mentioned the idea of gene testing, the doctor's theory about breast cancer ravaging their genetic makeup, twisting and distorting the very genes that make them who they are. They have stuck to easier topics, like dinner and designer handbags. For the past few minutes, Robin has been massaging her mother's scalp gently. The sound of water running and the smell of the shampoo calms the pounding in her chest, the feeling that there is not and will never be enough air in the room to fill her lungs.

But it's the last day. She knows her time here is running out. The thought quickens her pulse.

And while Robin is brushing her mother's hair, lost in her own thoughts of leaving, her mother speaks.

"Can I just say one thing about it?" she asks.

She is sitting in a chair set beside her bed with a blanket pulled up to her neck, but one arm sticking out. Inconsequentially, it is the arm she received her chemotherapy injection into that morning; from her spot behind her mother's chair, Robin can see the bruising around the gauze pad and medical tape.

Of course she doesn't have to ask to know what her mother's referring to.

"Yeah. Go ahead."

"I know you don't want the tests. I'm not going to try and change your mind because I know you're getting enough of it from Aunt Carol – but I just want to tell you that I don't want you to go through this." She moves her arm in a motion to suggest maybe this room, this life. "So if there's anything that could prevent it, that's what I want for you."

Robin pulls the comb slowly through a few strands of hair. "I know," she says. "I just don't want to feel condemned by this."

And this is her mother, so of course she understands.

But a few hours later, Robin's father knocks on her door. Robin is sitting cross-legged on her bed sifting through the last of the stuff from the closet. Trying to forget that morning with little luck. While when she woke up this morning, she wasn't ready to leave, now, she wishes she were on the next flight to JFK. The moment her father opens the door, she is staring at a photo of her peewee hockey team, trying to get back into that childhood mindset where everything was perfect and everyone was happy. In it, Coach Scherbatsky has his arm around her shoulder and everyone is smiling.

"You can get tested for the gene or whatever. I'll pay for it."

She turns her head up to look at him and squints.

"It isn't about money," she says. "I just don't want to know."

"RJ. You and Katie are both going to be tested. Do you have a medical degree?" he asks rhetorically. "The doctor knows what's best. So that's what we are going to do."

On first instinct, she makes herself small. She almost concedes.

Then she looks at the picture in her lap and realizes something: she's never going to have the kind of relationship she wants with her father. The only thing he brings out in her is fear and insecurity, the very things he would never respect. Her relationship with her father almost stops mattering – she is almost released from this hold he's had on her her entire life, the decades that the thought of him has followed her like a shadow inspiring guilt.

She has to get away from it.

So on her second instinct, she looks back up at him and says with a cool collectedness she didn't know she was capable of, "I'm almost thirty years old now. I can make my own decisions. Maybe they aren't always the right ones or the ones you would have chosen for me. But I am not you. I am your daughter."

For a moment, he is silent. She sees herself reflected upside down in his eyes.

But it doesn't last. He raises his voice and it almost echoes in the small and empty room.

"That's exactly it. You are my daughter. You are an adult. Only you continually behave like a child! You cannot even find a respectable career or manage your own finances. I allowed you to pursue these foolish aspirations of yours in New York so you would realize how hard of a field you have chosen for yourself. But you continue to maintain the illusion that you are making forward progress even after you have so blatantly failed. I cannot let you forfeit your health too simply because you made another foolish decision."

"I'm not going to do it," she says. She's thinking of hospitals and needles and surgery and those gowns and lying in a bed with an IV attached to her arm. And she isn't going to do it. Not any of it.

"Why will you not listen to reason? Do you hear yourself?"

"Do you hear _yourself_? You can't drag me kicking and screaming into the hospital. I am not six years old."

He laughs. He actually laughs. Hollow and harsh, like a bark. "RJ. This is insane. You have to understand. Why are you being so obstinate?"

"Either I get breast cancer or I don't. Taking the test will not change that." She collects herself, sits up a little higher. "And you don't have the right to talk to me like this."

"Of course I do! I am your father," he shouts, then punches the side of the archway with his fist. "You're going with Katie to get those tests."

"No I'm not."

He grabs her by the wrist and pulls her to her feet. She makes a noise that must surprise him, so he lets go just as quickly. And Robin grabs her purse off the floor and pushes past him into the hallway.

"In case you forgot, I'm leaving tomorrow. And if all I am to you is some fuck-up, then just forget about me! I don't need you."

She goes quickly down the stairs, leaving her father to stand in her room with her old jerseys and photographs and baby blanket.

In a rush, she heads out the door, stopping only to throw on a coat and pair of shoes. She makes it as far as the driveway, only to remember that she doesn't have a car or car keys here anymore and unlike in New York, her home here is on a street where taxis don't pass by. But instead of going back inside for her mother's keys, she keeps walking, heading in the direction of downtown Toronto, even though it's so far away she can't even picture how to get there. Her shoes sink into the melting slush on the ground around her, but she barely notices. She lights a cigarette.

When she has nearly reached the end of her block, she hears footsteps pattering behind her. She turns to see Katie running at full speed towards her in a pair of old galoshes.

"Where are you going?" her sister shouts. "Stop! Wait for me."

And Robin listens. She comes to a halt on the sidewalk and Katie, out of breath now, catches up to her.

"Where are you going?" she repeats.

"I don't know. Where's the nearest bar?" Robin asks, her voice erratic and breathy, as if she had no control over it.

"Like a fifteen minute car ride that way," Katie points in the direction Robin was heading. "Can I come with you?"

"Yeah," she answers. "Fine. I just need a drink."

They start walking again and Robin focuses on the sidewalk in front of her, on her feet stepping one in front of the other. She realizes she has been crying since she left the house, possibly since she stormed out of her room. She wipes her eyes on her sleeves.

"What happened?" Katie asks.

"Dad just being an asshole as usual."

Robin looks at the ground in front of her, the melting puddles of blackened snow. She trudges right through them, her feet squishing around in her wet shoes and wet socks.

"Let me text mom real quick. She heard the yelling and was worried. I'm just going to tell her we're going out for a drink."

"Okay."

"Robin?" Katie says, softly, after she finishes with her phone. She sounds so much like Lily does with that universal voice that girls use to comfort someone when they're crying. If they weren't walking, Robin thinks her sister might have tried to pull her into a hug and stroke her hair. Instead, she just asks, "What'd he say?" and Robin's glad because crying in front of her baby sister is embarrassing enough.

"Let's just get a drink, okay?" Robin says.

"What'd he say?"

"God, I hate him."

"Do you?"

"I really do." Robin kicks a piece of ice with her right foot. It skims the surface of a puddle before cracking into two pieces.

"What did he even say?"

"It doesn't matter," Robin says. "He just wants to make me take those tests."

They just keep walking. Katie doesn't respond and Robin knows it's because the four of them are united against her, that they don't understand why she just can't do this.

Robin finishes her cigarette and puts it out on the wet sidewalk. Katie looks at her and says, "You smoke?"

"I know. I've been quitting for like 5 years now. I'll get around to it."

Again, Katie doesn't respond.

"Don't start smoking, ever," Robin continues.

"It increases your risk more."

"Thanks, Aunt Carol."

"Robin, I mean it."

"I know. So does alcohol and coffee and not getting enough exercise. Everything causes cancer. We're fucked. We're really fucked."

After they're been walking for maybe twenty minutes, they manage to catch a taxi and take it over to the sports bar. It's already crowded with the dinner crowd and their plates of chicken wings and fried onions and burgers.

Robin leads Katie up to the bar, where they both take a seat. It's only 6pm, but Robin orders a scotch on the rocks anyway. She wants how she's feeling to be numbed. She wants it not to matter so much. So when the bartender finishes pouring it and hands it to her, she downs it in one gulp and then orders another.

"Robin!" Katie says. "What the hell?"

Robin, of course, ignores her sister's outrage. She doesn't care about being a role model or doing the right thing. And she doesn't care about the plethora of words Katie's psychology course probably has for someone like her.

"He just makes me so mad. Did I ever tell you how it was when I was a kid? He used to treat me like his son. He'd actually take me places and spend time with me. But when I turned fourteen, it was like I stopped existing for him. And now he thinks he can tell me how to live my life?"

The bartender slides the second glass to her over the table and she takes in a mouthful, this time savoring the taste as she waits for the first one to hit her.

"I'm sorry," Katie says, genuinely. She looks at Robin, but doesn't order herself anything.

Robin can tell her younger sister is fighting with herself to stay on Robin's side for this one. Katie already agreed to take the tests.

"What do you drink? Beer? I'll pay," Robin says.

"No, I don't want anything. At the rate you're going, you're going to need me to get you home."

"I'll be fine. And one beer isn't going to make a difference."

Katie doesn't answer right away, but after a few seconds agrees, "Okay."

She orders a Miller Lite and shows her ID. The two sisters sit in silence until the bartender opens it on the underside of the bar and hands it to Katie. Robin had always pinned Katie as a party girl, but judging from the way she sips at the bottle slowly, she realizes that Katie must have had a different life than she did, even though they grew up in the same house. She seems so well-balanced and so in control of herself. Robin isn't jealous exactly, maybe a little proud.

_How did you do it?_ Robin wants to ask. _Grow up with him as our father and come away from it perfectly fine?_ But she doesn't. Not outright.

They sit there a while, just taking slow sips. Until Robin has enough alcohol in her to start talking, to start really talking, to stop caring that the bartender might overhear or that she's unloading her problems onto her baby sister instead of pretending they don't exist.

"Do you know what happened after that last championship game?" she asks Katie after a while. She's referring to the last hockey game she ever played, the Pee Wee team from the photo in her room, that perfect game. Sometimes when she's drunk, she envisions her life a movie. But it wouldn't be told chronologically. It'd be backwards almost, from where she is right now (wherever she is). And that winning shot, followed by her teammates jumping all together in relief, in unison like a choreographed dance, shouting and hugging and smiling, getting their trophies (her father's arm slung over her shoulder, finally proud) – that would be the last scene. The big happy ending.

But it wasn't. Not in the chronological life she lives. She continues, "He hit me because I kissed a boy. I was fourteen. It was like he really thought I was his son. And that's not even the worst part… it was that he didn't even care afterwards, not enough to apologize or try to talk about it. It was easier just to ignore me."

"You never told me that."

"You were a kid when it happened. I didn't even tell Mom."

"So why do you… Never mind."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What?"  
"Why do you care what he thinks then?"

"I don't."

Katie says nothing, but sips her beer, eyes are still on Robin. But Robin can't interpret the look on her sister's face. Everything in her mind is sort of blurred together now, the scotch catching up with her. So she just keeps going.

"He doesn't care about me. He only wants to control what I do. But he doesn't care at all." She takes another long sip. She's so focused on it, she barely registers what Katie says next.

"I thought you were mad because you didn't want to take the tests."

Something, just on the edge of Robin's impaired perception seems not to click. But as soon as she tries to consider it further, the thought moves outside of her grasp.

"I am," Robin says and finishes her drink in one last gulp. She waves to the bartender and asks, "Can I have another?"

"If you get trashed, I'm not carrying you back," Katie warns. "I'm going to leave you on the side of the road."

"No you won't."

"I know."

It's only around 8pm when they get back to the house. But Robin lays down on her stomach on top of her bed and falls asleep for a few hours. Again, she dreams of Barney, of his arms around her, his bed, the kind of dream she wakes up from with a sense of loss. It throws her off balance somewhat, to be dreaming of him.

It is still dark outside and the house is silent and her head is still a little foggy from the scotch and all the talking. But she can't go back to sleep just yet.

So she calls him. She doesn't look at the time or do a mental evaluation of whether or not she is sober yet, or whether or not it's a good idea to call him when she doesn't know if she can trust herself to not say the wrong thing.

It takes him a while to answer. But he picks up on the sixth ring. One more and it would have gone to voicemail.

"Scherbatsky?" he asks.

His voice is heavy with sleep, but still surprised.

"Stinson."

"Are you drunk dialing me? It's like 3:30 in the morning."

"It is? I thought it was like 11. Sorry man," she says. "I can let you go."

"It's okay."

She hears the rustle of blankets and pictures him sitting up. Wearing those ridiculous suit pajamas. Then she starts to laugh, only it's more like a giggle. It doesn't even sound like her.

"Are you drunk?"

"No. I don't think so. Maybe. No," she says. Then, "Are you wearing those crazy suit pajamas?"

"What? These are not crazy. These are Armani and expensive and –"

"Crazy," she finishes. "They probably aren't even comfortable."

"Style over comfort. Style over comfort."

"Not for sleeping," she says. "Comfort is for sleeping."

"What are you wearing then?"

She looks down at herself and sees that she fell asleep in her clothes, even her wet socks. She starts to laugh again. "Jeans," she answers, then laughs some more.

"So you called me in the middle of the night to talk criticize _my_ sleeping attire and you're wearing _jeans._ I disapprove, Scherbatsky."

"I didn't fall asleep in jeans on purpose." She reaches down and discovers that not only is she still wearing jeans, but that she fell asleep in the wet socks too. They have since dried to a dull brown color and stuck to her skin. She peels one off her foot and lets it fall to the floor. "Or these nasty socks." She takes the other one off.

Robin stands up and unzips her jeans, angling the phone against her cheek so she can use both hands to slide them off. Then she climbs back into bed and pulls the covers over herself.

"There," she says. "No more jeans."

On the phone, she hears Barney clear his throat.

"You never called me," she tells him. She doesn't try and think better of it, just says it because it comes to mind. And she doesn't realize that it bothers her until she hears it spoken in her own voice.

"What? Was I supposed to?"

"I don't know." She guesses she is probably still uninhibited by alcohol. She doesn't care. "You still didn't."

"I thought you'd be busy with your family," he says. It doesn't sound like an apology; she isn't sure why she wants it to.

But he's right. She has been busy with her family, with cleaning and helping out with meals, with sitting next to her mother's bed and talking or watching movies she never would have watched otherwise. But there were still all those quiet afternoons she spent checking her phone for messages or missed calls while she sorted through her childhood memories or stole into the basement to look at her father's guns or traced familiar paths around her neighborhood with the nearly pack-a-day cigarette habit she has been trying to hide. Those are the times she wished he would have called.

"Robin? Are you still there?"

"Yeah," she says. "I guess I have been busy."

"Did you find your Space Teens costume?" he asks.

"I'm not selling it to you if you're going to do something dirty with it."

Barney chuckles. "Can't a guy just collect historic cultural Canadian artifacts?"

"I'm sure that's what you want it for," she says. "Don't you already have Jessica's?"

"Jessica? Do you mean Glitter? And yes, as a matter of fact I do. Which is why I would like yours, you know, to complete the set."

"Are you sure it isn't so you can hit on barely overage Canadian tourists and invite two of them to your room to model the costumes? Is this your big plan to take back the belt?"

"That was NOT my plan, Robin. But it sounds like an awesome idea," he says. "But really, my primary focus is the preservation of these important relics from Canada's Golden Age."

She can just hear the capitalization in his voice. She laughs.

"Seriously," he says.

They are silent for a few seconds before she speaks.

"I fought with my dad," she tells him. She isn't sure why she tells him. Maybe she knows he, unlike Lily, will keep it to himself, and he, unlike Ted, won't tell her to make up with him. Maybe she just needs to let it out. Maybe she feels she owes him the real reason for waking him up so late.

"Good for you," he responds. "He probably deserved it."

"Thanks," she says. She doesn't say anything more. But in the silence that stretches out between them, she feels it being said somehow, transmitted. She can feel, in his silence back, that he understands a lot more than he lets on. She can feel he's on her side. And it's just that simple.

"Thanks," she says again, smiling. She is tired now, just about drifting off. She is half-dreaming, back in her room in New York, Barney's voice in her ear. "I just got tired all of a sudden," she mumbles.

"Then go to sleep."

"Mmmm. But I'll see you tomorrow. Good night."

"Wait, Robin?" he says. He swallows audibly.

"Yeah?" she breathes. She's straining to keep her eyelids open and herself awake.

"I." He pauses, seems to change his mind and says, "I'll see you tomorrow."

Robin barely manages, "Good night," again before she is asleep with the phone still in her hand.

Robin has spent the morning trying to fit everything into her two suitcases. She hasn't spoken to her father – hasn't even seen him since the day before. When she looks out the window when she wakes up to the sun, his car is already gone. She doesn't know where he even goes. It's Sunday. As far as she knows, her father has never been to church. Not that she really had hope he'd apologize to her before she left, but all the same, she feels let down.

But after five days, Robin is ready to go back to New York. She is ready for the lights of the city to engulf her again. She is ready to push forward to get what she wants. She is ready to put kilometers—no, miles—miles and miles between her and her father, between her and all this.

Aunt Carol is in the kitchen making breakfast. Robin can hear the water running and plates and glasses and utensils being set on the table. She can hear Katie in the next room typing away at her paper, turning pages in her textbooks sporadically. Her mother has just woken up; Robin hears when the television turns on.

Since she's done packing, Robin goes into her mother's room. Her mother is lying back against the pillows, propped up like a rag doll, the same way she was when Robin first arrived. Only now, her hair is visibly thinner and her eyes carry a tired look to them even though she just woke up after having slept all night.

"Little bird," her mother calls quietly. She chuckles when Robin approaches and says, "You went to bed earlier than I did last night."

"Yeah."

She doesn't want to tell her mother it was because she drank too much. But something in the way her mother's brows crease suggests she already knows; and not only that she knows, but that she knows why.

Her mother casts her a look that Robin can only describe as apologetic and says, "I know your father is a difficult person to deal with when you're have opposite opinions, but he loves you and only wants the best for you. He didn't mean to upset you."

Robin focuses on those four words: _but he loves you_. And whatever argument her mother was trying to make is already lost because Robin doesn't believe those four words.

"Why are you apologizing for him?"

"I'm not apologizing for him, Robin. I just want you to understand that these things are complicated. He doesn't want to see you suffer from something like this when it could be prevented. None of us do. But we can't force you to do something you don't want to. It'd be a whole lot easier if we could."

Robin looks at her mother in the middle of the king-sized bed, her head sticking out from behind the big down comforter.

"I understand," Robin says. "I don't agree, but I understand."

"We still see you as our little Robin. But you're an adult now and we have to respect your decisions."

She just stands there next to her mother's bed a few minutes, thinking of how it's the last morning she will do so, at least for a while.

It seems to occur to her mother too.

"You're leaving today," she says. Her voice carries no sense of blame or anger, just a quiet sadness for something out of any of their control. She holds her arms out and Robin moves forward to hug her. Her mother's hair still smells faintly like the shampoo Robin used on it the afternoon before, lavender and chamomile.

"I'm sorry," is all Robin can say as she stands there with her arms around her mother.

It is her mother who pulls away. "Robin, don't apologize. It was nice having you and Katie around, and the whole family back together," she says. "You have your job and everything in New York. I understand. Your father and I were getting used to being empty-nesters."

"I'm just sorry I stayed away so long."

"I know. It's okay." Her mother squeezes Robin's hand. "How about you help me down the stairs and we call it even? It smells like Carol's making pancakes."

After breakfast, the four of them climb, once again, into the minivan. The ride to the airport isn't as long as Robin remembers on the way in, when it was just her and Katie and a lot of silence. Not that there's ever really enough time to say goodbye, but by the time they reach the airport and unload the trunk, Robin isn't ready to leave them just yet.

She says so, more or less, but in different words.

In response, her mother says jokingly, "You have work tomorrow. Now, shoo," before pulling Robin in for a last hug that both Katie and Aunt Carol join in on.

If she were thinking this moment instead of living it, Robin would have come to some powerful conclusions about female solidarity and strength while standing their outside departures with her arms around them. But as it is, all she can do is wipe her eyes on her sleeves and try to memorize it.

An hour and a half later, when her plane finally takes off, she is still living in that moment as she watches Toronto become the size of a toy city beneath her, still wiping her eyes as her mom and sister and aunt tell her they'll miss her, missing them already.


	9. Part 9

**Author's Note**: It's been like a month, right? Hopefully this chapter makes it worth the wait! As always, thanks everyone for the kind reviews. If you read, please review!

IX

_Ladies and gentlemen,__welcome__to the John F. Kennedy International Airport.__ For your safety and comfort, we ask that you please__remain seated__with your__seat belt fastened__until the Captain turns off the Fasten Seat Belt sign. This will indicate that we have parked at the gate and that it is safe for you to move about. We remind you to please wait until inside the terminal to use any__electronic devices__._

The last trails of the pilot's voice echo through the economy cabin, among sounds of mingled chatter, whining kids, and the gushing wind outside.

On the lowered tray in front of Robin Scherbatsky lies an open compact mirror, resting precariously atop an overstuffed purse. She angles her neck in order to come to terms with her own reflection as she reapplies her mascara. Nearly content with the reflected image, she runs a finger under her left eye to rub in a smudge before snapping the compact closed and depositing it in the handbag.

Amid the disregard for the voice on the intercom, people are checking their cell phones and collecting their luggage, although the plane hasn't stopped yet. A woman behind Robin takes her seatbelt off and begins stretching. A few rows back, a baby begins to cry. People everywhere are shifting in their seats, collecting the items within their reach. A few have begun to stand, despite the warning, to the chagrin of the nearest attendant.

Just as the general anxiety and claustrophobia in the economy cabin seems to reach its boiling point, the plane pulls up to dock 8 and the flight attendant's soothing voice comes over the intercom: _Ladies and Gentlemen_, _please check around your seat for any__personal belongings__you may have brought onboard and please use caution when opening the__overhead bins__, as heavy articles may have shifted during flight. On behalf of myself and the entire crew, __thank you__for flying American Airlines. Please enjoy your stay in New York City._

The attendant's words pass by mostly unheard as the family sitting in front of Robin collects their carry-on luggage from the overhead bins; the two sons argue about who gets the TV first when they get home. They stand in the lane blocking her until the mother moves to the side to yell at her sons and Robin is able to squeeze past.

Robin thanks her dual-citizenship for letting her skip through immigration and into customs ahead most of the crowd. Still, it's in vain because when she gets to the luggage claim, the bags from her gate haven't even been unloaded yet. She grabs a spot right at the mouth of the conveyer belt and stands impatient and weary. It's always the same, getting acclimated again to solid ground after being seated in the same position for hours. It reminds her of her days as Robin Sparkles and all of the mall tours, all of the hours spent on a tour bus driving clear across Canada.

A few minutes pass before she takes out her cell phone and calls Ted.

But it isn't Ted who answers.

"Hey Sparkles," comes a low voice from the receiver rich in suggestive undertones.

Before she has a chance to even open her mouth, the low voice immediately shifts to become upbeat and excited in the way only Barney Stinson's can.

"Did you bring it? Did you bring it? Did you bring it?" he asks.

His voice carries no trace of last night, none of that soothing mumble of concern, just the overexcited tone that usually characterizes him. She is half-inclined to imagine the call between them never happened; but the fact that he's asking for her Space Teens costume changes things, makes last night all real. Funny how with Barney, her past as a 90's pop star is so often the thing that grounds her.

"Swarley," she returns, suddenly unsure of what to say.

He interjects, "Hey! We aren't back to that—I mean, oh! my favorite nickname," laughing just for show, "But you brought it, didn't you?"

"Maybe I did. Maybe I left it in a lockbox in Toronto." She hears Barney scoff into the receiver. "Where are you guys?" she asks as she spots one of her suitcases and pulls it off the conveyer belt. The other, of course, is not right behind it as she would have hoped. She watches the parade of luggage and duffel bags as they are conveyed around the circle.

"Marshall and Lily and I," Barney announces, "Are waiting for Theodore to finish using the ladies room. We're by Starbucks and –"

In the background, there seems to be a grapple for the phone. Robin can hear Lily saying in the background, "This is New York. There are probably 15 Starbucks at this airport alone. Ask what gate she's at."

"Lily says what gate?" Barney repeats. Then, an overdramatic "Chill out," intended for Lily.

Robin looks at the sign immediately above her and answers, "36. Terminal 8."

Barney repeats it to Lily and Marshall.

Robin hears Marshall say something about getting to ride on the AirTrain, to which Lily responds with something Robin can't fully hear and Barney says, "Bros never ask for directions."

"Marshall, The Bro Code expressedly states that a bro does not ask for directions, article 99. If you violate the Bro Code, there will be an injunction against you. Unless of course, you ask directions from a 9 or 10."

"I can just come find you guys," Robin says, looking again toward the luggage claim for her missing bag. "Just as soon as I find my other suitcase—"

"Lily's going to ask. Marshall remains a bro."

Robin sighs. "Wonderful."

But really, she doesn't know what she expects. He isn't going to suddenly stop being Barney and be the caring, sensitive guy. He isn't going to transform into Ted. And she doesn't want him to, right?

"So, laser tag today?" Barney asks.

She signs audibly. It's the furthest thing from her mind. She wants to eat and go to bed. Or find some skillful way to combine the two. "I don't know. I'm tired," she says.

"But I have Red Bull." He pronounces the phrase like he's bribing her but it doesn't work in the slightest.

"Barney," she whines.

"Robin," he whines back, "Laser tag."

"I'm tired."

"Wake up then."

She yawns loudly into the phone. "Maybe after I get something to eat," she concedes, after a pause. "Maybe."

"Come on, Robin! It'll be legendary!" he says, predictable, familiar, comforting. "Oh," he says, interrupting his own train of thought. "Ted's finally back. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. WE WILL FIND YOU."

"Terminal 8. Gate 36," she manages to get in before he hangs up.

Robin puts her phone away and looks around for her other suitcase. After a few minutes, the conveyer belt comes to a halt. She walks the path around it, past other travelers in a similar situation, checking each black suitcase for her green luggage tag. But no luck.

The thought crosses her mind that maybe someone took hers by mistake. Of course it's the suitcase with her Robin Sparkles costume in it and her childhood diary and a bunch of photographs. If someone opens it and sees all that stuff, what would they even do with it? Would they just laugh? She sighs. How embarrassing. She keeps up the search for a few more minutes.

Just when she is about to say good riddance to all the embarrassing artifacts from her past once and for all, she sees it, or thinks she sees it, devoid of the green identifying tag, but defined by the awkward bulk of it. She rushes forward to make sure. Then she inches the zipper open about an inch and sees the glittery pink journal she carried around through most of her early teenage years, then she yanks it closed again.

It doesn't take her friends much longer after that to find her. She sees Marshall first, at least a head taller than most of the crowd. Then her eyes move to Lily. Ted and Barney are following along behind them, scanning the crowd. She waves her arms at them until they spot her.

When they step out of the steady stream of suitcase-wielding travelers, she sees what appears to be a big pink sign held up between them.

"No," Robin says almost inaudibly.

The sign, which looks like it was made by a five-year-old, or more likely, Lily during her lunch hour, is complete with glitter and feathers and a color photo of Robin freeze-framed from _Let's Go to the Mall. _It reads, _**ROBIN SPARKLES! **_in Lily's loud purple script.

"Seriously?" she says as she approaches them.

"Barney told us you have action figures," Marshall says when she gets close. "We had to." He's smiling his dorky kid smile and Robin can't help but laugh.

Then she looks around for the culpable party, who she discovers standing off to the side with a slight smirk on his face.

"I told you that in confidence," she says to him in an overstated and accusatory whisper as he pulls her into a hug.

"Like they wouldn't have found out anyway," he says.

Robin closes her eyes and breathes in his cologne. It can't be more than a few seconds that they stand like that, arms around each other, but to Robin, it feels like much longer.

Did they used to hug like this? Where the side of his face touches hers, a warm spark where their skin meets? Where she has to tell herself to let go, to step back, has to remind herself they're only friends and she can't just turn her head the slightest bit and brush her lips against his neck?

Robin only opens her eyes when Ted, Lily, Marshall, and the sign join in on the hug.

"We missed you!" Lily says after a few quiet seconds, when they're pulling apart. "How was your flight?

"It was fine. I listened to some music, watched the same episode of The Office twice, and we were already landing."

"Nice," Ted says. "Which one?"

"The wedding."

In response, Ted makes a girlish noise that causes both Barney and Robin to roll their eyes.

"You're such a chick," Barney says to Ted.

Robin, due to the pounding in her chest, avoids Barney's gaze and instead focuses her attention on Marshall. He chooses that moment to hold the sign up to a group of Canadian tourists. After a few seconds hesitation, the majority of them pull out their cell phones to take Robin's picture.

"That sign!" she says, torn between exasperation and laughter. "Seriously? Can't you turn that around or fold it up or something?"

"Wait," Marshall says. "Wait!"

Barney fumbles with something in his pocket and then a familiar melody fills the air.

"No," she says, simply, in that way she does when she's trying to pretend something isn't happening. "No." A pause. "No, no, no, no."

Barney blasts the volume on his iPhone, so that anyone within a fifteen foot radius, including the group of Canadians, can hear it.

"I'm just starving," Robin says over the music. "Come on. McLaren's. Now. Let's gooooo."

"Let's go to the mall!" Marshall and Barney sing at her and then high five.

She can tell they were probably planning this all day as she looks between the four of them, so completely pleased with themselves, just beaming like a bunch of—

"Idiots," she says, letting her smile widen.

After Robin and Ted drop off the suitcases at the apartment, they go downstairs to join the others at their regular booth. By now it's late afternoon and it's been hours since Robin's had anything to eat. So on the way in, she leans over the counter and orders a burger, her rumbling stomach unable to wait for Wendy the Waitress to come around to the booth. Then she slides into the empty seat next to Barney.

No one asks about the week she spent with her family, not yet. It seems almost forgotten amid the celebration and the joking banter and the beer. Barney berates Ted for something that must have happened at GNB while she was in Toronto, but she doesn't ask for clarification; she lets it go right over her. She doesn't want the attention, not yet. She's still, though she hates to admit it, in that state where she's perpetually a few select words away from crying, where she'd rather just put it all from her mind than fully process it.

So when Wendy brings the burger over, Robin devotes herself wholeheartedly to it.

"Do you have food in Canada?" Marshall says after a few minutes.

With her mouth full, Robin gives him a look. "Plane ride," she says, though it comes out unintelligibly because she hasn't finished chewing or swallowing.

The others attempt to make faux-guesses at what she meant to say. But none of it makes much sense because they are trying to make fun of Canadian cuisine, a topic none of them know anything about.

Robin takes a swig of beer and clarifies while they're all still looking at her, "Plane rides make me hungry."

She swallows the last bite and Barney unsuccessfully tries to sneak a handful of fries without her noticing. At first, she swats him away playfully, but a few fries later, she pushes the basket towards him.

Then Ted fills them in on his week, describing his continued feud with Zoey at times like a Shakespearean tragedy, not that Robin remembers much of classic literature aside from the fact that Shakespeare must have loved to end his plays in a bloodbath. Still, she gets the point. The overly dramatic point: Ted is still Tedding out about this.

"They can't grasp that someone was going to do it anyway," he says. "Why not me? Why don't they get it?"

Ted takes a long sip of his beer and Lily murmurs some comforting words in his direction that seem to help things.

Then there's a silence that settles among them. Just the sounds of chewing and swallowing, conversations seeping into their booth from the tables around them.

It's probably Robin's turn to offer up her own trials and tribulations from this past week, but in picturing them—her mother in an open-front hospital gown, herself huddled over a glass of Johnny Walker Blue wishing for the impossible, her aunt standing in the kitchen nude from the waist up and that thin pink scar where her ridge of breast has become a valley almost, the photographs and diaries from a childhood where the worst to happen was a black eye after a tournament game or her father making her practice her shot for three consecutive hours after a lost game or bad practice—they are all overshadowed by that hangman. And it's too close. Too close to share. Just too close to the core of her, that small locked box underneath the armor where her heart is still heaving in her chest, vexed by the sheer weight of it all.

"Are you doing okay, sweetie?" Lily asks.

And Robin nods. She doesn't trust her voice for the too-familiar lump that forms in her throat, the warmth rising behind her eyelids.

Lily gets up from her seat and comes over to hug her. Robin buries her face in Lily's neck, Lily's hair and breathes in slowly. The air shakes its way down her trachea. But she doesn't cry.

"We love you, Robin," Lily says, "We're here for you if you need to talk."

"I know," she says. But what she needs isn't to talk, not yet. It's to get back into the swing of things, stop being _this, _this fragile child a step away from tears. She needs to be in control again.

She feels Barney's warm hand on her back. And from behind the shield of Lily's hair, she sees Barney watching her, studying her; she wonders if everything, the whole story of her life, is written on her face somehow in a way only he knows how to read. So she closes her eyes. So she gulps down air like water. So a few moments later, she pulls away.

"Is everything okay?" Ted asks. She imagines his eyes narrow the slightest bit, the way TV dads' do when they know their kid isn't letting loose the whole truth.

"You look so sad." This time it's Lily.

Robin swallows the lump in her throat and exhales. When she responds, it is after a pause, after she begins to trust her voice again.

"Long week," she says. It comes out like it should. "I'm fine."

It's her first night back. They don't press her further.

Robin leaves for work the following morning creeping through the living room on tiptoes. She even holds her breath as she passes the couch where Ted fell asleep the night before grading assignments. Some end of the term deadline. She pulls the door closed behind her as softly as she can.

Outside, it's still dark. And for maybe the first time, leaving for work while the rest of New York City sleeps seems unnatural to Robin. The only people on the streets are boys on bicycles delivering newspapers, men on corners setting up their bagel carts, and bartenders, waitresses stepping into taxi cabs after last call with wads of singles. Riding in the cab on the way to the station, looking out at the dark and nearly empty streets, watching these night wanderers, a clock somewhere inside Robin starts counting down. She doesn't think too hard about it, what that internal minute hand is counting down to, but there is slight a quickening in her pulse.

_Twenty, twenty five years_, _thirty,_ she thinks.

Maybe there's a time in everyone's life where a life like this seems thrilling, unconventional, has a sort of aura that draws them in: maybe the going against the pull of the moon on their blood, the natural tide of the human body. But in this solitary and quiet instant, it isn't for her anymore.

"Pull over for a second on this corner," Robin tells the cabbie.

She climbs out and runs over to a newspaper dispenser on the corner and buys a copy of _The Times_, the_ Post, _and the_ Daily News_ then returns to the taxi, its driver yawning.

"Okay," she says and the driver resumes his route.

In the backseat of a taxi cab at 4 in the morning, Robin rips the Classifieds out of each paper and folds them carefully so they fit into her purse. By the time she finishes, they have arrived at the station.

"I look like an old, balding witch," Robin's mother says to her on the phone one afternoon two days later.

That morning, Robin's mother's hair started coming out in chunks. Even with the soft bristled brush, one motion down the back of her head would come away with whole clumps of hair. No pulling or tugging necessary, as if the membrane connecting the strands to her head disintegrated overnight. But on the bright side, the doctors said they can definitely tell that the treatment is working.

Robin doesn't know how to answer. Words like _It'll grow back_ and _You could get a wig_ die on her lips when the sound of her mother breathing turns to laughter.

Her mother continues, "Too bad Halloween already passed." Then she cracks up at her own joke, her breathy laughter punctuated with gasps.

But, the following day, from her aunt, Robin hears another story: her mother with the brush at 6 in the morning in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing so as to pull the remaining hair out, her scalp red, moist tears still fresh on her face, how Aunt Carol found her sitting there, took the brush from her hand and led her like a small child back to bed.

And it isn't just strange to envision her mother as mortal, as having weak moments; it's more than that. What Robin really can't let go is her mother hiding under the guise of her nonchalant humor, how these are the things that characterize them: both mother and daughter.

There are more phone calls, some ending with silence, others with raised voices pleading with her to about the genetic testing and her arguing back, "I'm not changing who I am for this. It's not my life," like some kind of mantra.

Her mother and aunt and sister talk about the risks, about changing her lifestyle, about taking precautions, and the conversations always end with Robin saying, "Screw the odds. Either I get it or I don't."

One night, Ted overhears and questions her about it.

"Get what?" he asks her.

She tells him, "Nothing," and he responds skeptically with a narrowing of eyes that tells her he's going to ask Lily. She thinks quick on her feet, remembering the resumes she has been sending out and says, convincingly, "A job."

By Friday, Robin has fallen back into the pace of New York City. Her body has finally acquiesced to her sleep schedule: it has stopped fighting when the alarm pulls her out of bed before the sun has a chance to and has allowed her to fall back asleep after work instead of lying in bed half-awake and restless.

That evening finds her at McLaren's Pub, sitting across from Barney Stinson with 8 empty beer bottles between them. They're both fixated on the Hawks vs. Rangers game, even though the outcome doesn't matter to either of them in the slightest, even though Barney claims hockey isn't really an American sport. But they watch because it's on and because they have already exhausted all of the neutral topics between them: commentary on the Miller Light commercial with the man in the skinny jeans, Robin's continued refusal to give or sell Barney her Space Teens attire, and their mutual disdain that everyone else has gone home before 8:30 on a Friday night.

"Bunch of old ladies," Barney grumbles.

Ted ducked out right after dinner to finish grading term projects before his deadline, to which Barney scoffed, "But it's Friday night!"

Lily and Marshall stuck around for an hour or so longer, listening to Robin talk about the jobs she's applying for, Barney and Marshall talking about GNB. But as Robin could have foretold, Lily whispered "Nutmeg" during a lull and a few minutes later, her and Marshall had left McLaren's.

It's the first time since she got back that Robin's been alone with Barney. She hasn't called him drunk and mumbly since Toronto. And he hasn't called her either. It's different, somehow, her being back here. Like with all that distance they were closer than they are now, sitting only two feet apart. Like it was easier for them to speak without seeing the other's reactions. Those reactions got lost in those mountains and hills and farmlands, those dark and starry nights, and neither of them had to worry about what they meant, if anything.

Robin watches the game. A goalie she isn't familiar with makes a save she can't believe was possible. She thumps her bottle against the table and Barney laughs at her and takes a long swig of his own beer.

She wonders if they've all made some sort of secret pact to spend whatever time they can watching her. She can't logically fathom any other possible reason for Barney to sit across from her, twisted around awkwardly in his seat to watch a hockey game for an hour.

After a few minutes of relative silence, Barney finishes his beer and pushes it against the other empty bottles.

"Laser tag?" he asks, wildly, as if he's only just thought of the idea.

And because Robin's tired of just sitting in awkward silence, she says, "Sure," without hesitation.

They both get up from their places mechanically and head to the bar to pay, nearly colliding in the aisle.

"I got it," Barney says, pulling out his wallet while Robin protests at his side. "I got it," he says again, with more force.

As the cab winds its way along darkened New York streets, Barney leans over to Robin and whispers, "So you're okay now."

Her eyes darken and she answers, "Was I sick?" with venom in her words, the weak part she keeps caged up fighting back. With more feeling that she intends, she continues, "My mom's the one with cancer."

But Barney ignores her tone entirely, as if her were expecting it. He isn't even looking at her, but out the window. "You know what I mean," he says.

"I never said you had to worry about me, Barney. I'm perfectly fine on my own."

He turns to face her, but doesn't respond right away. He studies her, it seems, like that first day back in the bar. Again, she imagines somehow her soul or whatever it is deep down conveyed in the expression on her face. She hurriedly says, "I'm fine. Just leave it alone."

"Whoa, Scherbatsky. Don't get all defensive," he says. He brushes her off with bravado, but she can tell he's a little hurt by the way he avoids meeting her eyes.

A week ago, she knows she would have blown up at him. Screamed at him. Maybe threw her shoe. But this week, maybe just because she's glad to be back and glad her mom is okay and maybe even glad that Barney was even the smallest bit worried about her, she doesn't.

"Sorry," she says. It comes out more of a breath than a word.

"You're sorry?" he repeats, incredulous. "Are you sure?"

"If you keep saying it like that then I won't be."

"All right," he says, chuckling to himself.

Team Scherbatsky-Stinson completely dominates the first round of laser tag, though Robin barely sees Barney the entire time, only hears his laugh echoing from behind darkened structures. A sweat breaks out on her back and forehead but she moves and shoots like it's what she was born to do, stealthily, as if she isn't really there at all. Her target practice at the shooting range pays off because she comes out of it ranked first in kills. _Hits_, she corrects herself.

They have a fifteen-minute break for Gatorade and Red Bull before they put their gear back on. The rules are explained: Players have 20 minutes to reach the other team's base, specifically, a line inside of it, and return to their own without getting shot. The gun will vibrate when they step inside the enemy boundary. At that point, the LCD of every other player will list that person's name.

They have a few minutes to strategize with the rest of the Red Team, comprised of 2 high school boys, a handful of 13 year olds, and a tomboy mom. They allow Barney to be team captain and in seconds their strategy is born: a horizontal sweep from their base forward, leaving two of the kids as guards.

"Hopefully, we won't need to use them," Barney says. "We'll make a line no one can get through. And if anyone gets to their base, it'll come up on the LCD. Then just take out all members of the Blue Team you can and cover our runner."

"GO RED TEAM!" the mom shouts waving her gun in the air.

Barney rolls his eyes and Robin sizes up the competition. It looks like a middle school boy's birthday party: 6 kids and 2 dads. Then 2 teenagers: a girl and a boy who seem to be on some kind of date.

"Let's do this," Robin says, just before the buzzer goes off and they all run to the red base.

In that dark, humid room, time operates differently, minutes disappear sometimes as seconds. Robin's on the top level, making her way slowly, stealthily to the Blue Base, as outlined by Barney. She snipes a few members of the Blue Team through a grate in the floor and makes her way slowly, on tiptoes, so they don't know where she shot from. When their base is in sight, she looks around. They don't appear to have a guard. Or if they do, he's hidden well. She sees another member of the Red Team take out two Blues and then get shot by another. They don't see her, so she descends the ramp and steps into the Blue Base. Her gun vibrates loudly in her hands and she hears the hustle of a group of plastic-vest wearing preteens coming from another direction. So she takes off running, shoots the Blue teenage girl, and presses herself against a wall, crouches. All of her senses are occupied.

She doesn't hear anyone or see anyone.

When she's nearing the halfway mark, she trips and lands at an awkward angle with a loud thud and searing pain in her ankle. Looking back, she sees a discarded sneaker.

"What the hell?" she says.

She looks up just in time to see two middle school boys, one shoeless, peek out from behind one of the structures. She shoots them both in the chest before they have time to raise their guns.

"Man down!" one of them shouts.

"Over here! She's got the flag!"

"Damnit!" Robin shouts back. She stands up, grits her teeth and pulls herself together. Not far off, she hears Barney hurling childish insults and laser shots at a group of them, probably the rest of the birthday party.

The clock on her LCD reads 4 minutes left. Then it buzzes loudly and she thinks she's been shot – but it's just that someone on the Blue Team has made it into the Red Base. She has to make it back before they do.

In a combination between limping and hobbling and running, relying on instinct, Robin makes it to within 10 feet of the Red Base. The creeping sensation that she's running from something else entirely crosses her mind. Then she is shot from behind by the teenage boy, a punk with a Mohawk.

"Noooo!" Robin shouts, finally resigning to the pain in her ankle. She plants herself there, cross-legged, and shoots anyone who comes near. Four minutes later ,her pack vibrates again and the game is over. Blue never made it back to base either, so it all ends in a stalemate.

Afterwards, Robin and Barney take a cab to his apartment for a glass of scotch and an ice pack. When they arrive, he helps her limp to the elevator, down the hall, and into his apartment.

"I'm fine," she says. "It's okay. They should have banned that kid for life though. That's foul play. We would have literally beat the crap out of them if that asshole had only kept his shoe on."

"Thirteen year olds never play fair."

In his living room, Barney sets Robin up so that she's lying on the couch with right foot propped up on his bed pillow, an ice pack in her hand. Then he pours them each a glass of scotch. He hands her one and they both sit in silence for a few long moments, still coming off the high of adrenaline.

Robin holds the bag full of ice against her ankle clinched in her hand. The ice has already begun to melt and escape its zip-lock prison. It forms little streams that trail down the side of Robin's leg. She wipes them hastily with her other hand, but they keep forming. Still, she doesn't discard the bag or ask Barney for another. She doesn't ask for a towel to dry herself. She doesn't say anything, just wipes the stray water with her other palm, spreading it around on her leg.

If Barney notices, he doesn't let on. "So, is your sister eighteen yet?" he says more than asks, breaking silence.

"Barney, gross. I forbid you from making any comments about my baby sister. That's what Ted's sister is for."

"Ah, Heather Mosby," he says, leaning back on his chair and taking a sip of scotch. "Whatever happened to her?" The playful light from earlier is back in his eyes.

"Couldn't stand living in the same city as her brother?" Robin ventures to say.

"Wrong," he says. "If she stayed, we definitely would have hooked up. So she decided, for the sake of her relationship with her brother, she should go back to Ohio. But the Mosby family Christmas card should be arriving any day now. She said she'd wear something slutty."

"You talk to her?" Robin asks. She wonders if Ted knows and what they even have to talk about.

"No. I text her, Scherbatsky. It is not the same thing."

"You communicate with her," she rephrases.

"Yes, but only within the bounds of the Text to Call Ratio."

"The what?" she asks, humoring him and preparing herself for another long explanation of one of his theories. She reaches somewhat awkwardly over to the coffee table, her leg still propped up on the couch, and grabs her glass. She takes a sip of the copper-colored liquid.

"The Text to Call Ratio. You can't just call anyone. It is an invasion of time and privacy."

She thinks she probably gets it. Something about friends and acquaintances, but she feels a familiar fire behind her own eyes and decides to play devil's advocate. "They don't have to answer. Just look at the caller ID," she says.

"No," he says, pausing for another drink, "They have to miss your call and call you back. Or choose to ignore you," he explains. "Making a personal phone call is a lot like showing up unannounced on someone's doorstep. They can pretend not to be home, or pretend to be busy if they see you and you can't see them. But if they don't have a window or anything, they just open the door and you're already there. It's awkward."

"You could tell them to leave," Robin says with a laugh.

"Depending on who it is," he says. "Here, if you had to contact… let's see… your co-worker – the blond with the knockers who uses baby talk –"

"Becky," Robin interjects with a grimace.

"Yeah, the dumb blond with the boobs. If you had something to tell her, would you call her?"

"No," Robin says. "But she calls me all the time."

"That's because she thinks you're friends. And you aren't her friend, so you don't call her. Texting is for acquaintances, coworkers who aren't friends, booty calls, and people who talk too much if you call them. If you call someone, they have to stop what they're doing and answer and they might be eating or marathoning Star Wars or in the middle of a three-way."

"You text me," Robin interrupts his tirade to point out.

"But I also call you."

"And that gives us both the right to show up at the other's doorstep whenever we want?"

"Is that not what I said?"

"No, it is."

The bag of ice on Robin's ankle has become a bag of cool water. But still, she holds it, futile, to her ankle. The pain has already subsided with the help of the half glass of scotch.

"Any better?" Barney asks, getting up from his chair to have a better look.

He lifts her leg up slowly and sits on the couch with it on his lap. She moves the melted ice bag away to let him see, though she's sure he doesn't know what to look for any more than she does.

"It looks less swollen," he observes. "Can you move it?"

"Yeah. It's probably just a sprain. It'll be fine," she says, sitting up to have a better look at it. She did sprain her wrist once during a playoff game after she just started high school.

"Do you want more ice?"

"No, I think you have to wait 30 minutes in between. I always had to ice something after hockey games."

"Why? Did you get into girl fights?" He raises his eyebrows at her.

"There weren't many girls in the league," Robin answers.

"Wait, you played with guys?"

"What'd you think? My dad would let me play in an all girls league?"

"I don't get it," Barney starts. "Usually people who play violent sports get all messed up. But you still look hot."

She laughs.

"No, seriously. How do you not have a crooked nose or missing teeth or anything?"

"Luck?" Robin answers. She brings the glass to her lips once more.

"It's really luck," she continues. "I got injured all the time. I sprained my wrist once, broke some ribs, had my nose broken in a fight with this French Canadian, fucking Marcel. Oh, and when I was fifteen I got the tip of a skate to the back of the head." Her voice carries the indifference of someone more than used to injury. She turns her neck and lifts up her hair in a familiar spot, showing Barney the spot, maybe a few centimeters long, where hair no longer grows. She thinks of it, her blood on the ice, how by that time in her life, it didn't scare her anymore. The thing she remembers most about it is the applause when she stood up, almost on her own, with her helmet in her hand, victorious.

"Shit," Barney says, leaning closer to see.

With her head turned, Robin can't see him, but feels his fingers on her scalp, the caress of his breath on that line of dead flesh. She shivers and turns back to face him. But he stays close.

"It wasn't a big deal," she says, because she feels like she needs to keep talking. "Our center collided with the other team's left defense and I got a few stitches. It happens all the time. I knew someone who got a skate to the forehead and had a scar all the way to the bridge of his nose. Even years later, it still looked disgusting. All deep and discolored."

Their faces are still inches apart. When she finally shuts up, for a moment neither even breathes.

And then he leans in.

The kiss is soft, like the touch of a feather, until she opens her mouth to it, until they fall into their unforgotten rhythm, until his hands start to move along her thighs, her stomach, her chest, and hers on him, everywhere on him, remembering what for that magical summer her fingertips had memorized. He unclasps her bra. She loosens his tie. His lips on her earlobe, her neck, her lips.

"God, Robin," he says, voice deep in his throat.

He kisses her like he's rendering her apart, breaking down walls and time and any semblance of the armor she has buried herself in. He kisses her like she's oxygen or a damn good scotch, like on her lips he's tasting the whole of her, taking it all into himself (her fears and failures and resolutions and secrets and hopes and future and even that damned hangman). He kisses her, and she kisses him, like it means something.

_No_, she tells herself. _It isn't like that_. It's her and Barney and they're due for a relapse, aren't they?

But there's something in it so much like her first fall on the ice— having the wind knocked out of her lungs, pressed up against that frozen ground, this reality, and wanting him, more than anything else, to know she's already fallen, undeniably, fallen hard. Maybe it feels a little like she's dying here, a part of her anyway, on the couch in his apartment. An old part of her falling away, baring something bright and new and completely foreign underneath.

And it's terrifying. Being out in the open and raw like that. What is she doing, baring herself for him after they've already been through this, already determined the things they keep locked inside are supposed to stay that way? What is she doing, stripping herself of her armor right in front of him when he'd rather her keep it on, let it clank together loudly and insufferably against his own? She feels an undeniable urge to run.

"Barney, wait."

Slowly, he leans back slowly. He looks at her with cloudy eyes, looks at her ankle, the water from the forgotten ice pack now a slight puddle against the couch and her pant leg.

"Sorry. Your ankle?" he asks.

"No. Not that. It's fine. I just…" she mumbles, she breathes, she looks down, "I can't do this."

She wonders if he's ever heard those words before. From a girl he's hovering over still, inches away from kissing, a girl so determined not to cry that she's contorting her face, drained, pale, quivering.

She looks up at him, into those blue eyes, and he backs away, retreats to his side of the couch. She can't read him – angry? hurt? confused? she guesses.

Slowly, he gets up. Slowly.

And slowly, she does too.

"I should…" she says, reaching for her purse, standing , favoring her left leg.

"Are you sure? Can you even walk, Scherbatsky?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just a sprain," she says.

"You could stay. I could sleep on the couch. It's no problem," he says. "I won't…"

"No, no. It's okay. It's not… I should just get back."

In seconds, she's at the door. She pauses to look as he sits down on the couch and puts his head in his hands. Then the door clicks shut.

This time she's the one running away. Well, almost. She makes it as far as the elevator before she realizes she left her jacket draped over his chair, her keys in the pocket along with her cigarettes. She slinks down the side of the elevator and her eyes start to well up. After all that, how can she go back up there? She punches the wall with a fist and tries to calm down. She can still taste him on her lips, still feel the warmth of him leaning over her. What is she doing? What is she running from?

The right thing would be to go back up there. It would be to not make a big deal of this. It would be to stop crying. It wouldn't be to call Lily to let her into her apartment and just abandon her keys at Barney's.

"Damnit," she says, wiping her eyes on her fingers.

Minutes later, when she's still sitting there holding her cell phone like a lifeline, red eyed and sniffling, her bra still unclasped under her shirt, her phone starts to ring and the elevator door opens.

From her seated position, Robin sees his shoes first, then the suit pants, then her jacket dangling over his forearm, then his cell phone pressed up against his ear. And he looks down at her.

"Robin?"


	10. Part 10

**A/N**: I feel terrible for making you all wait this long for the last installment of this!

I spent a month in Costa Rica refreshing my Spanish and didn't have much time to work on this. But now I'm back, slightly tanner and no less obsessed with HIMYM.

But anyway, here's the last chapter of The Best Armor. I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It's been a long journey! As always, if you read, please review. And if you enjoyed this, you might want to check out my other How I Met Your Mother fanfiction.

* * *

**Chapter X**

[Refresher—in the last chapter, Barney + Robin went laser tagging, talked a bit, shared a rather passionate kiss which resulted in Robin running away with a sprained ankle and only getting as far as the elevator, where Barney finds her - go!]

"Shit. Did you fall?" Barney says, coming over to where Robin is sitting on the floor of the elevator. "Are you okay?"

She shakes her head, though she isn't sure which question she's responding to. She averts her eyes, trying to hide tears and smudged mascara even though he's probably already noticed.

"Come back upstairs," Barney says. "You can't even walk."

Robin says nothing but doesn't fight when he pulls her up and drapes her arm over his shoulders. She allows herself to be lifted like a child and removed from the elevator. And she can't help but think of her mother, weak, falling apart, being carted back to bed. The thought doesn't help everything she's trying to keep silent.

"You can have my bed. I'll take the couch. And I'll take you back in the morning. Is that okay?"

Robin nods but is otherwise silent, unable to trust her voice.

"Did you hit your head or something?" he asks, angling her towards him, as if checking for some sign of damage.

She shakes her head and brings a hand up to wipe her eyes. But when she lets it falls back to her side, fresh tears have already formed and start to slip down her cheeks. And why? She doesn't know, not anymore. She closes her eyes. Barney probably thinks she's insane. And as he half-pulls her down the hallway, her unable to make a sound other than the strangled sobs she can't stop from escaping her throat, she's inclined to agree.

With one arm around Robin's waist, the other fumbling with the key, Barney opens the door to his apartment. The scotch is still on the table, the Ziploc bag of water lying on the couch, the memory of the two of them only ten minutes before still fresh in her mind. He sets her down on the couch more gently that she thought him capable of, and then grabs the leaking bag. Somewhere behind her, the ice machine powers up and the apartment is filled with the sound of it. Barney returns a minute later with a fresh bag of ice.

"Here," he says, putting it in her hand. "I'm going to call Ted. Can't worry the Mother Hen," he says with an attempt at a laugh that doesn't quite make it out of his mouth. With that, he disappears into his room and closes the door. She can hear his voice, muffled, "Ted, you awake?"

Robin leans forward and pours herself a half-glass of scotch. She knocks it back and then pours another one.

Barney's voice passes through the walls and reaches her. "Some asshole kid tripped her at laser tag. Her ankle's all swollen. And I think she fell in the elevator when she was leaving my place. She seems of out of it now," she hears, and then more muffled conversation she can't make out.

After a few minutes, the door creaks open and Barney sticks his head out. "Did you hit your head at laser tag?" he asks.

Robin shakes her head.

"How about in the elevator?"

"No," Robin says. "I'm fine."

"Shit, Scherbatsky, why'd you go all Helen Keller on me then?" he says. "She says she's fine. I'll just get her back in the morning. Yeah, you too. Bye, dude."

He comes back over to her and sits down on the opposite side of the couch.

"Do you want to lie down? Sheets are clean, I swear."

Instead of answering, she asks a question of her own. "Can I smoke in here?" she says, though she is already pulling the pack and lighter out of her purse.

After a pause, he answers, "Only if you share."

So Robin draws out two cigarettes; one, she sticks between her lips, the other, she extends to Barney. She lights hers, takes a puff, and passes over the lighter. She is lost in the familiar taste, the comforting feeling these motions bring her. After he lights his own, Barney gets up from the couch and opens a window. From the sill, he brings back a tin can half-full with ashes and cigarette butts, which he sets on the table between them.

Neither of them speaks again until their cigarette butts have joined the others in Barney's tin.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

She thinks a moment, but decides against getting into right now in the middle of the night. She answers, "Yeah, I'm fine." As soon as her words echo back in her ears, she realizes how foolish they should: how shaky; if he knows her at all, Barney can see through them. She takes another drag.

"I don't believe you," he says.

When she doesn't respond, he pours himself a glass of scotch and takes a big gulp of it. The cup clinks against the table as he sets it down, empty. It is the only sound in the apartment, save for their breathing and the sound of the wind.

"Why'd you leave?"

"What?" she says, even though her own words from earlier echo back to her: _I can't do this_;even though she can still picture herself scrambling to get up and then running away. Robin drops the cigarette butt into the tin and lights another.

"Why did you leave?"

"I gave up sleeping around with ex's for Lent."

He doesn't laugh like she expects him to. Instead, when he answers, his voice is cold. "It's November. And you're not even Catholic."

She laughs, maybe a little forced. "I know," she says and breathes out a wisp of gray smoke. It dissipates in the general direction of the open window, pulled out by a breeze she doesn't feel. "Fuck, Barney." Though she's looking straight ahead, she can see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye. "I can't just _sleep_ with you. It wouldn't ever be… just sleeping with you. What were you thinking? Just because I was here or something?"

"Robin, it wasn't—"

"So you weren't trying to take advantage of me. You probably thought you were helping somehow, right?" she says.

"It's not like that." He runs a hand through his hair. "I just… I wasn't trying to just sleep with you."

She thinks back to the kiss, the slow rhythmic movement of his lips and tongue against hers, the breaths that felt more like sighs against her skin, the way his fingers cupped the side of her face, the way it was different than it used to be. But she doesn't let herself believe him. And even if she did, she can't forget how bad it all ended up, how hard it all was, how much it hurt. She can't handle any more of that right now.

"You're my bro, but you're also not just my bro," Barney says, sort of fumbling for the words. Robin can tell he hasn't had enough to drink for this conversation. But he's saying it anyway. "I know you've been having a hard time and everything with your family sucks, so maybe I'm just being a dick for throwing this at you now, but..." He takes a long drag on his cigarette, like he's working up courage for something. "I want to be with you. Have you ever thought about trying again? With me?"

Robin exhales smoke and leans back against the couch. "For a long time," she says. Her throat constricts, just enough for her to need to stop for a deep breath.

She can't look at him straight on – it would make what comes next too hard – but she knows his expression. That rare one he gets sometimes when he lets her in. The truth is she's never really stopped thinking about it. She's been waiting. It's like this past year she's been holding her breath in expectation of those words, waiting for him to mean them and for some sign that this time, they wouldn't tear each other apart.

But they're still the same two people they were a year ago; stubborn and independent and fiercely afraid of getting in too deep, of needing someone else too much.

So she says, "For a long time, I thought like we didn't get a fair run. It ended so fast. But I've been thinking about it. We were only together on the surface. It wasn't anything else. And if you were really honest with yourself, you'd know that's all it was."

Barney clears his throat. "If _you_ were really honest with yourself, you'd know that's not true," he counters. He leans forward and speaks in a low voice. "I know you, Robin and I know you're hiding. We've been friends for, what? 6 years? And you still act like if you let anyone in, they'll take off running. Every little thing, it's like we have to pry it out of you."

"Like you're any better!"

"I've been trying."

"I have too."

"_Sure_. You haven't said anything about how you're taking all this stuff with your mom." He makes a gesture. "Not to me or Ted or Marshall. Not even to Lily. You just get quiet and drink. Or go smoke a pack of cigarettes by yourself on the roof. Or run off and almost sleep with some guy and come back a mess. Or you call me on the phone drunk in the middle of the night and pretend it doesn't mean anything the next day."

"I'm not—"

"We know this is hard on you. Ted kept telling Lily not to push you. But you need it. Have you seen yourself lately? You hardly eat. You look like you haven't slept more than a few hours. You've been smoking more than I've ever seen you and drinking all the time. And you pretend everything is absolutely fucking normal. You were never a good liar, Scherbatsky."

"So was this your big plan to find out what's wrong with me, then? Did you guys all sit down and plan this together?" She flicks her cigarette butt into the tin can on the coffee table and starts to stand up, unconsciously almost, like she's going to leave. But something in the way Barney's looking at her makes her sink back down onto the couch.

"No, I already told—"

"You want to know? You want to fucking know?" She says, somewhere in between a cry and a shout. "It runs in my fucking family."

"Robin—" he starts.

"No. Listen to me," she says, her voice falling now to a whisper. "My grandmother died before I was born. And my aunt Carol has had it twice now. The second time, she barely made it, so she had a mastectomy when I was fourteen. She didn't have plastic surgery or anything afterwards. There's just this hollow space… Like it's a trophy or something."

For the second time that night, Robin's eyes fill with tears and the voice the escapes her throat sounds like it belongs to someone else. "And now my mom."

Barney reaches over and puts a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he says.

"And they want me and Katie to take all these tests, all these tests that will basically tell us what we already know: we're fucked. We watch the two of them go through it knowing in maybe 20 years it'll be us."

Robin's not looking at his face, but at the makeshift ashtray in front of her, the still burning cigarette he must have set there a few minutes ago. The tip burns slowly, the nearly whole cigarette balanced against the rim.

But she doesn't see it.

Instead, she pictures her aunt back in the kitchen in Toronto, her shirt rolled up without dignity, without shame; her body some horrible tortured thing that will never again be seen without a hint of disgust or with the ruthless indifference of medical workers or of her own remembered pain and fear. Robin thinks of herself in the kitchen in Toronto shielding her eyes, thinks of Barney sometime in the future doing the same thing.

She has to make him understand. Still crying, Robin takes his hands slowly into hers and then places his palms against her shirt, holds them to her breasts.

He lets her. He's watching her, his brows creased, entire face framing one question.

She tries to explain before the courage she's gained from the scotch fails her. "I know it's not like you want to be with me because… but, if I had to have a… a mastectomy, I wouldn't want… Or the chemo, I wouldn't want you to… I wouldn't want any of you to see me the way I see them. It would change everything. _This_ isn't who I am. I don't want to be…_this_… I can't."

"Robin," he says, and she half expects him to make some joke. But he doesn't. It ends there. His hands are still on her breasts, hers are still holding them there. They are warm through the shirt she's wearing. A moment later she drops her hands and his follow.

"Robin," he tries again. His voice breaks. "Look at me," he says.

So she does.

She sees him through a blur of tears. And it is so different from the way she is used to seeing him that it takes a while for this new image to catch up with her retinas.

His tie is loosened, the buttons at the top of his shirt undone, the shirt itself un-tucked and wrinkled. With his eyes red and the little creases gathered along the sides of them, he looks unbelievably exhausted and raw. And his eyes have that look they sometimes get during his brief flitters of honesty, but the expression is etched into them so deeply, Robin has a hard time convincing herself it wasn't there like this, steady, all the years she's known him. And she knows she was wrong, so wrong. They really have changed. She could never have imagined a reality where they would sit here and she would tell him the one thing she was most afraid of, only to have him not make some snide joke to brush it to the side.

Barney swallows. Then he reaches forward and pulls her to his chest. "It wouldn't be like that," he manages.

He runs his fingers through her hair and she thinks, maybe, that he might be crying now, too, because the side of her head feels warm and wet and his breathing noises sound wholly unfamiliar to her. For some reason, it doesn't bother her like she thought it would. Instead, she stretches her arms around him and rubs her palms against his back. Then she rests her head at the crook of his neck.

Robin knows what it is: knows that this last piece of armor between them has somehow, noiselessly fallen away, that they're sitting here now, open and honest, for maybe the first time.

Barney's lips brush against the skin of her neck as he mumbles low somewhere in the vicinity of her ear, "It wouldn't change anything."

And with the intensity of a downpour from dark, bursting clouds, Robin believes him.

After a few long minutes, Barney slings his arm around her shoulders and Robin imagines the two of them speaking in low voices, saying all the right things, slipping out of this reality into another where the shadow of the hangman doesn't follow so close.

When Robin's tears finally stop, neither makes a move for the scotch or the cigarettes. Instead, they take deep breaths. Instead, they sit there, holding onto each other as the last red ember of the night burns out slow.

The End


End file.
